No, you are not alone.for non-tech population, it may make sense that .NET 5 is continuation of .NET 4. But the tech crowd knows .net 5 is to .net 4 is what angular 2 is to angular 1.
With .net 4 still in active use, the naming makes it harder
Might be more confusing when you consider that ".NET 5" is actually the continuation of ".NET Core 3.1", not ".NET Framework 4.x"[0].
Microsoft has historically been pretty bad at naming stuff (sometimes hilariously so, see Microsoft PlaysForSure[1] for an example - spoiler: it surely didn't play for long).
The rebranding from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5, and from .NET 4.x to .NET Framework, did make sense to me though - and increasingly so as development continues on ".NET > 5" with yearly releases, while ".NET Framework 4.x" is in maintenance mode.
.NET Framework was always called .NET Framework and not renamed from
NET 4 to .NET Framework. There was a time where .NET was applied as a prefix/suffix to everything Microsoft released. Microsoft Windows Server .NET. that had nothing to do with the framework/CLR/programming platform but with Internet connected features.
Fair enough - I meant that, at least in Microsoft's own communication, they started more consistently referring to .NET Framework 4.x to differentiate it from first .NET Core and later .NET.
While it was always called .NET Framework, it was very commonly referred to simply as .NET (e.g. .NET 4.5) - and the "Microsoft .NET" logo was widely used in .NET Framework branding/marketing.
the drop of .NET core branding definitely makes it worse. as the other projects(like asp.netcore, efcore) just can't drop "core" from their names on a whim.
in my opinion, they should have kept "core" branding, but shortened it to ".NET" for marketing and only for marketing.
in a better world, Microsoft would ditch the name ".NET" altogether and invent a new one. like LVM (lightweight virtual machine)
No. Was hard enough to convince people of .NET Core away from the .NET Framework. Adding a completely different name and I would have several hundred java devs now instead of beautiful .net 10 on Linux.
With .net 4 still in active use, the naming makes it harder