Relationship between Base Class Library and .NET Standard

Question

A rookie question: .Net Standard set of APIs are a "subset" of a .NET's Base Class Library (BCL) implementation, like Mono? That is, a BCL is bigger set than .NET Standard's set of APIs?

Answer 1

Yes, .NET Standard is a subset of .NET Framework's class library. Simply said, sorry for the simplification, .NET Framework was here many years ago, but only for Windows. Now they try to provide .NET for other platforms but not everything is so easy, so they are adding piece by piece. This multiplatform standard is called .NET Standard and is the same everywhere, not just for Windows like the good old .NET Framework.

Also note that .NET Standard 2.0 is much more closer to .NET Framework's library than .NET Standard 1.0 was. (That 1.0 was quite empty, I'd say, but this is just a personal opinion.)

Answer 2

.NET Standart defines uniform set of BCL APIs for all .NET implementations to implement, independent of workload. It is the set of fundamental APIs (generally known as base class library or BCL).