What is .NET Standard, and why is it less relevant now compared to a few years ago?

Intermediate

Answer

.NET Standard was a formal specification of APIs that both .NET Framework and .NET Core (and Xamarin, Mono, etc.) committed to implementing, letting library authors target one .NET Standard version to support multiple runtime flavors simultaneously. Since .NET 5+ unified the platform and .NET Framework is no longer receiving new .NET Standard version support, most new libraries now target modern TFMs (like net8.0) directly instead of .NET Standard, unless they specifically still need to support .NET Framework consumers.

<!-- Older library approach -->
<TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework>

<!-- Modern approach, unless Framework compatibility still needed -->
<TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>

Real-world example A widely-used open-source logging library still targets netstandard2.0 specifically because many enterprise consumers remain on .NET Framework 4.8 and need compatibility, even though newer consumers use net8.0 directly.

Common follow-ups: What's the highest .NET Standard version, and what does it guarantee?;When should a new library still target netstandard2.0 in 2026?

.NET CLI SDK & Project Structure (csproj);Assemblies & NuGet

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