Understanding .Net Core and Mono

1. When developing an application in .Net Core, the .NET dependencies and DLLs are embedded in the application? does this mean that I do NOT need to install the .Net dependencies on the client PC?
2. If I develop a .Net Core console application for Linux, is it necessary to install Mono on the PC with Linux (client)?
3. Are .Net core applications compatible with Android?

Answer

To your question:

No the dependencies are NOT embedded in the application (no static linking in .NET).
Yes, the dependencies are added as separate files, when you publish (self-contained).
If your application is a .NET-Core application, you do NOT need the .NET-Core framework installed. Neither do you need Mono.
You can do a self-contained deployment for each platform:

Windows-x86-32:

dotnet restore -r win-x86
dotnet build -r win-x86
dotnet publish -f netcoreapp2.0 -c Release -r win-x86

Windows-x86-64:

dotnet restore -r win-x64
dotnet build -r win-x64
dotnet publish -f netcoreapp2.0 -c Release -r win-x64

Linux-x86-32: NOT SUPPORTED BY .NET-Core

Linux-x86-64:

dotnet restore -r linux-x64
dotnet build -r linux-x64
dotnet publish -f netcoreapp2.0 -c Release -r linux-x64

Linux ARM (Android/ChromeOS)

dotnet restore -r linux-arm
dotnet build -r linux-arm
dotnet publish -f netcoreapp2.0 -c Release -r linux-arm

Linux-arm-64: NOT SUPPORTED BY .NET-Core

This adds all dependencies, including the .NET-Core runtime libraries. You can still run into problems if a used DLL references a native-dll (that it provides as embedded resource), but does not provide the necessary C-Runtime-libraries (e.g. when the native-dll/.so is dynamically linked – such as in SkiaSharp).

Also, .NET-Core can be run with the shared-framework, which means deployment size is smaller, but the shared-framework-version must be installed, then.

3. Since Android is linux – and you’re not having an Android that runs on an x86-32 processor or an ARM-64 processor, .NET-Core should be Android-compatible. I never tested that premise. Might entail bugs. ARM-support is sketchy.

However, it is unclear to me what you want to do with .NET Core on Android. Since .NET does not implement any Android-UI interfaces. Xamarin-Forms might support Android-UI with .NET-Core – it certainly does with mono. You could however run a web/other-server on Android, or a console application.

See CoreDroid