Comment by NetMageSCW
15 days ago
.Net has always been hugely backwards compatible and breaking e.g. .Net 8 apps which will run out of support in November 2026. How is constantly needing to update .Net any different from constantly needing to update any other part of Windows?
Ideally they would just install newer .Net releases side by side and uninstall .Net releases as they drop out of support.
Microsoft promises things included with Windows will be supported ~forever. Adding modern .NET into the mix would break this promise and add more churn.
Automatically uninstalling .NET runtimes would break apps, and Microsoft will be to blame, not app vendors who failed to upgrade to the latest .NET. An app built for .NET 8 can run on .NET 10, assuming no backwards-incompatible changes in the runtime and system libraries, but this behavior is opt-in.
.Net releases are installed side-by-side. I agree with the Author that a more recent minimum install of the framework would make sense, especially with the existence of LTS releases of .net [1], seems to be every 2nd major version. I don't agree with the argument that Windows would have to guarantee a particular version is installed. If an app requires .net 8 and .net 10 is installed, the app can install .net 8 next to version 10. It would however require different silos within Microsoft to communicate and plan together.
.Net 4.81 is the last one before .Net Framework was unified with .Net Core. It's very legacy by now, but there would be many enterprise/business apps that still require it.
[1] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/d...