.NET Core vs Mono

Question

What is the difference between .NET Core and Mono?

I found a statement on the official site that said: \"Code written for it is also portable across application stac

Answer 1

This question is especially actual because yesterday Microsoft officially announced .NET Core 1.0 release. Assuming that Mono implements most of the standard .NET libraries, the difference between Mono and .NET core can be seen through the difference between .NET Framework and .NET Core:

• APIs — .NET Core contains many of the same, but fewer, APIs as the .NET Framework, and with a different factoring (assembly names are
  different; type shape differs in key cases). These differences
  currently typically require changes to port source to .NET Core. .NET Core implements the .NET Standard Library API, which will grow to
  include more of the .NET Framework BCL APIs over time.
• Subsystems — .NET Core implements a subset of the subsystems in the .NET Framework, with the goal of a simpler implementation and
  programming model. For example, Code Access Security (CAS) is not
  supported, while reflection is supported.

If you need to launch something quickly, go with Mono because it is currently (June 2016) more mature product, but if you are building a long-term website, I would suggest .NET Core. It is officially supported by Microsoft and the difference in supported APIs will probably disappear soon, taking into account the effort that Microsoft puts in the development of .NET Core.

My goal is to use C#, LINQ, EF7, visual studio to create a website that can be ran/hosted in linux.

Linq and Entity framework are included in .NET Core, so you are safe to take a shot.

Answer 2

In a nutshell:

Mono = Compiler for C#

Mono Develop = Compiler+IDE

.Net Core = ASP Compiler

Current case for .Net Core is web only as soon as it adopts some open winform standard and wider language adoption, it could finally be the Microsoft killer dev powerhouse. Considering Oracle's recent Java licensing move, Microsoft have a huge time to shine.