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Windows Subsystem for Linux

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With Windows 10 Creators Update one of the features that got released publicly is Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). But it was available for Windows 10 Insiders for almost like a year now and was initially announced at Build 2016. WSL basically lets you run Linux on Windows. If you are thinking about a VM, No, it’s not a Virtual Machine.

Configuring WSL on Windows shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, by following these steps you can configure WSL pretty easily. Once you have configured WSL, you should be able to use Bash on Ubuntu, just by opening up the Command Prompt/PowerShell and running bash commands.

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WSL

Or you can Search for Bash in Windows, and there should be a desktop app named Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.

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Bash On Ubuntu On Windows

Currently, under WSL only Ubuntu is supported. Maybe in the future Microsoft might support different flavors of Linux.

On WSL, one of the things that fascinates me more is the File System that is already mounted for you.

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File System

And through the bash, we can just run mkdir and the folder will be appearing inside Windows Explorer the same time.

And most importantly we can run .NET Core Apps on WSL. Here we have installed .NET Core on WSL, (again it’s pretty easy, just follow the relevant steps described here) and created an ASP.NET Core HelloWorld application.

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.NET Core on WSL

And we can just browse the site from a Web Browser in my Windows OS. Isn’t that just great?

Happy Coding.