Microsoft started open-sourcing key components of the .NET framework with support for platforms other than Windows back in 2014. The company completed the process in February last year with the release of the .NET CoreCLR to the open-source community. After more than a year of development, .NET Core 1.0 became available to developers in June 2016, and last October the 1.1 Preview 1 was released.
Now Microsoft has released updates to the .NET Core SDK, included in Visual Studio 2017 RC. You can also install the .NET Core SDK for use with Visual Studio Code or at the command line, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Be sure to check out the release notes, because important changes were made to Docker Images, and the update is no longer supporting or building for Fedora 23 and openSUSE 13.2, since they have both gone out of support.
As for improvements, Microsoft says that:
You can now specify a target directory for your new template, with the -o argument, such as in the following example: dotnet new console -o awesome-new-tool. If the target directory does not exist, it will be created for you. This can also be combined with the -n argument to name projects, such as in the following example: dotnet new console -n awesome-new-tool -o src/awesome.
Target frameworks now have their own argument, -f. You can specify a target framework for any template, provided it is a legal value, such as in: dotnet new console -f netcoreapp1.0. The target framework values are the same as the ones used in the project files.
Solution file management has been improved. You can now create an empty solution file with dotnet new sln and then add projects to it. You can create solution files before or after project files, depending on your preferred workflow. If you have been using the older project.json-based tooling, you can think of solution files as the replacement for global.json files.
For a full list of changes, check out the .NET blog post. You can grab Visual Studio 2017 RC here, and the .NET Core 1.0 SDK - RC4 here. As far as Visual Studio 2017 is concerned, it"s looking like it"ll go gold/RTM very soon.
Source: .NET Blog