Farewell .NET 7, support ends in May – we hardly knew you Support for Microsoft's .NET 7 software framework ends in May, a mere 18 months after its 2022 release – a reminder that the days of enterprise-pleasing long-term updates are receding into the past. .NET 7 made its debut on November 8, 2022, and unlike its predecessor, is a Standard Term Support (STS) release meaning that its …
Okay, but we really ought to put in perspective what "not supported" means exactly, in practice.
Just for reference, I made a bunch of .NET 3.0 software, way back then, and it's still working fine on the latest Win11 machines.
I suppose it might "have vulnerabilities", in theory, but it's not web-facing, it doesn't run as admin, and, anyway, the same could be said of any software that hasn't been recompiled against the latest libraries in 20 years.
It also could be recompiled on .NET 8 or whatever with minimal changes, if I wanted to. Yeah, they don't guarantee the APIs will be identical for decades, but in practice that's very nearly true in most cases. Which is about the same deal or better as what you can get on every platform under the sun.
For comparison, I was also making Win32 programs in C++ in the same period, and running them on Win11 was about the same effort. The executables would mostly work, some pain with recompiling with the latest toolchain. I honestly doubt there's any platform where you wouldn't get at least that, except on extremely static platform that seldom see major updates.
It also could be recompiled on .NET 8 or whatever with minimal changes, if I wanted to. Yeah, they don't guarantee the APIs will be identical for decades, but in practice that's very nearly true in most cases.
You can't assume this though, as you'll then end up hitting the case where it isn't.
Our net3 -> 6 migration at work used some of those APIs, and it wasn't a 5 minute job.
6 to 8 was much easier, but there are other teams that have come across issues with that too.
Even when the APIs are unchanged and it does appear to 'just work', there's still a round of testing and validation to go through. Also, with anything above the 'trivial' level you're more than likely to have at least one dependency you need to upgrade as well. That's another source of 'I hope they haven't changed the APIs too much'.
I think this was more of an issue earlier in the lifecycle - there were more cases of incompatible changes as a result of rethinking some of the fundamentals. That seems largely to have stabilised.
The "big thing" in .NET 7 was ahead-of-time native compliation which is not something many people will be using and was feature-incomplete. It's probably best to regard the ShortStandard Term Support versions as feature previews which allow you to start the development process, but to deploy using versions with greater longevity.
Externally, there doesn't seem to be much new at all in .NET 9, but I suppose it's an opportunity to get some of the internal changes exercised by a wider audience.
Microsoft has made it quite clear that odd numbered .NET releases will have relatively short term support, while even ones will be long term releases.
So this is a total non issue. Anyone who developed on .NET 7 would likely be in a team that is constantly developing and upgrading an active product and needed or wanted to integrate new features without waiting for .NET 8. And when .NET 8 came, it would probably have been simple to recompile to that (I found even .NET 6 code easily compiled without changes to .NET 8).
Anyone building something that wants long term support should use .NET 8 and stick with that even when .NET 9 comes out.
Is it really that hard to understand?
Name one thing Microsoft itself uses Dotnet for: It won’t even used it in Microsoft Office.
Remember, the Vista trainwreck was largely caused by an attempt to use Dotnet to build lower-level components of the OS. When they threw those out and started again, that delayed the release by about 18 months.
I am not sure Rust and .NET are oriented towards the same tasks.
.NET is widely used for web development, and Blazor (which sits on .NET) seems very much the future in terms of where Microsoft is going with that. I very much doubt any of that will end up using Rust.
You do know Microsoft has been trying to hire Rust programmers, don’t you? They even say publicly they’re being hired to get rid of C♯ code.
You lucky bastards! You lucky, lucky bastards! Proper architects pets aren't ye? You must have slipped them a few quid eh? What wouldn't I give to use .NET 7! I sometimes lie awake at night dreaming of using .NET 7.
I got thrown in to help out at a project that uses .NET 3.5.1 ! I asked for one cross instead (first door on the left), because using an antique version of .NET is more painful than crucifixion.
Some time ago I built a set of tools in .net 2 (because they had to run on multiple machines not under our control and that was the lowest common denominator). Now in theory those tools would still work but the lack of support for later versions of TLS in old frameworks meant that (due to my having sloped off to a new job) the rest of the team had to take on the job of migrating to a newer framework (where the same problem still exists - can't go straight to the bleeding edge because the target landscape is a mixed bag so again it's pick a compromise version and plant a flag, repeat again at some point in the future).
Management are super happy about all of this because the toolset it replaced ran in VB6 (yes, yes I know) for donkeys years without complaint. <shrug> progress.
In my circle of Devs, the last thing they want is to get in a regular cycle of upgrades....
Taking Open Source as the example, it's hard work keeping pace.
Incidentally, I know ,NET is still used plenty but almost exclusively it's 99% in the Windows ecosystem. I haven't come across anyone using it outside of POC in Linux.
I expect most .NET will be running on linux sooner rather than later, as people start shifting to containerized apps.
My current employer is shifting from Oracle based monoliths to .NET microservices running on Alpine-based containers.
Half of the devs aren't even running windows boxes for their dev machines.
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