Just a word of warning:
Windows NT and Windows Server 2003 do not support .NET 4.5 – you can not install the framework onto these systems.
So if you are building in visual studio 2012 and have to support Server 2003 (or earlier) then you must remember to target .NET4.0 (or lower) in your project(s) otherwise you will not be able to run them on the target system. That would be a really bad thing to find at the end of the project; another good reason to implement continuous integration/deployment into any project from the outset (and deploy to an instance/server that represents the target o/s)
As part of his fantastic ‘What is .NET standard‘ presentation at DDD12, Adam Ralph provided an amazing amount of detail in such a short amount of time. One of the most valuable points, which is completely obvious when you think about it, is how you should work with .NET standard when creating libraries. NET standard now comes in a multitude of flavours: currently 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0. When starting out . . .
If you’re trying to access a class library (.NET Standard) from a traditional console application (in VS2017 those can be found under ‘Windows Classic Desktop’) you will run into problems; which can feel a little strange for something that was pretty simple in VS2015 and earlier. You can add a reference to the class library project (Resharper will even volunteer to add the dependency / namespace reference if you don’t already have it). But the . . .