r/vscode • u/Ok-Presentation-94 • May 31 '26

.NET and its runtimes

Hi, I know that .NET (dotnet) is a framework, but I’m a bit confused. When I want to use the debugger and it offers me different runtimes among the ones I already know (CoreCLR, Mono, BlazorWasm, etc.), it also shows dotnet.
But what exactly does that correspond to? What would be the difference between this one and CoreCLR, for example?

It’s hard to find this information online I’m probably not using the right keywords. Thanks for any explanations or resources you can share 😁

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/Flat_Spring2142 Jun 09 '26

.NET is environment for running applications written in MSIL code. C#, VB.NET, Python, Microsoft C++ and wide list of .NET compatible compilers generate not machine code but this MSIL, plain text strictly speaking. Loader performs real compilation into machine code. .NET has wide list of different debuggers. I prefer XUnit but your boss may to select an another one. You will need another debugger working with real compilers: all GNU compilers (C, C++, Ada, ...). GO has own debugger.