The long-term support (LTS) version 6 of Microsoft .NET Framework is slated to go out of support on November 12, 2022. Microsoft recommends upgrading .NET 6 applications to .NET 8 to stay supported for the future.
Microsoft .NET Framework version 6, released in November 2021, is approaching the end of its support date. According to Rahul Bhandari, program manager at Microsoft .NET team, customers using version 6 should move to .NET 8 to still receive official support and security patches.
Mr. Bhandari explains that the .NET 6 applications will still run after the end of support date, but that customers can be exposed to potential security flaws that will be patched only for supported versions.
Version 6 is what Microsoft calls a long-term-support (LTS) release, having a support lifecycle of three years since the release date. Non-LTS (or "current") releases, such as .NET 7, have a shorter support lifecycle of 18 months, as Microsoft will support them for six months after the release of the next LTS version. Microsoft schedules .NET versions to launch one major version of .NET a year, alternating between LTS and current versions.
The latest LTS version of .NET is 8, which Microsoft plans to support until November 2026. Microsoft expects to release .NET 9, a non-LTS version, in November 2024, meaning that the current .NET 6 customers can choose between upgrading to .NET 8 or 9 when version 6 support ends. .NET version 7 already went out of support in May 2024.
Upgrading to .NET 8 involves a change of one line in the project file to change the target framework version. However, there might be runtime or source-code incompatibilities between .NET 6 and .NET 8.
Microsoft recommends that developers check the official compatibility guide for any issues when upgrading their applications and provides an open-source upgrade tool called upgrade-assistant. The tool analyses the application code, updates the project files, checks for breaking changes, and performs some automatic code fixes—but developers will still have to perform some manual fixes.
The developer community's reactions on social networks are mixed. In this Reddit thread, some developers think that the speed of releases is too fast and that the "short overlap (of versions) is ridiculous", while others argue that "taking a day to update to a new LTS every two years is hardly a scary prospect".
Microsoft regularly publishes summarised telemetry information derived from the usage of .NET SDK. According to the data for May 2024, the most used version of .NET Framework for applications is precisely this version of .NET 6, accounting for 39% of the telemetry data, with .NET 8 being second with 26% of the installations.
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