None of that is particularly developer friendly, and it makes it hard to build .NET tooling into ephemeral environments like CI/CD build tools and runners, where you need to populate a hosted container for test and compilation, loading a new instance of the .NET CLI every time you fire up a GitHub Action — and having to run tooling with a much higher set of privileges than you want for an automated process. Things get more confusing when you’re maintaining an application with a current build of .NET at the same time as updating it for the next long-term release, all on the same development workstation.
With platform-specific toolchains and installation mechanisms, complexity gets in the way of coding and .NET becomes less of a priority, despite its cross-platform features and its maturity. It’s clearly time for a new approach to installing .NET, making it easier to set up, without requiring users to elevate permissions (helping keep their systems secure).
Up and running with dotnetup
That’s where the public preview of dotnetup comes into play. As the name suggests, dotnetup is the equivalent of rustup for .NET: one command that sets you up to start coding wherever you are, on a Windows PC, in a Linux container, or on a MacBook. Like rustup, dotnetup is a simple command-line tool that installs SDKs and runtimes, along with platform tooling. It’s configurable, so if you only need specific tools, you can install only them. And dotnetup supports working with different versions of .NET, keeping them isolated from each other, allowing you to dedicate specific workspaces to different .NET releases. It allows you to develop against specific versions, without affecting the global, machine-wide runtime used to run .NET applications on your PC.
