Update to .NET 7 or 8?

[Anutrix]

Now that .NET 8 is almost out and .NET 5 is past the support end date(May 10, 2022), maybe we can move to a newer .NET LTS version.

EOL info from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core.

[Klocman]

Updating to .NET 6 shouldn't be too difficult, but it's low priority since it doesn't seem to give anything of value to BCU. I totally forgot that I already did this, BCU is already using .NET 6.

.NET 7 and up are not going to work for now because at least Windows 10 is required at runtime. There's still a sizable amount of users using 7 and 8.

[tonyping]

Updating to .NET 6 shouldn't be too difficult, but it's low priority since it doesn't seem to give anything of value to BCU. I totally forgot that I already did this, BCU is already using .NET 6.

.NET 7 and up are not going to work for now because at least Windows 10 is required at runtime. There's still a sizable amount of users using 7 and 8.

Win7/ 8 usage has actually fallen off quite sharply in just the past year:

via Statcounter

For instance(one year ago), Win7 was standing at an impressive 11%; now just 3%. And Win8.1 usage has declined to 0.72%.

[Anutrix]

Maybe we can do both builds for short term like how qbittorrent Project did with qt6 migration. Not sure how much maintenance nightmare will be.

[Klocman]

There's no point in having builds for both framework versions since no new features could be used anyways. The only real difference would be the .NET7/8 build not working on W7.

[mooms06]

The point would be to remove the need to have .Net 6 installed, as many programs have moved or will move to .Net 8.0.
.Net 6.0. support will end in less than a year: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy

Windows 7 & 8 are EOL, why should we keep compatibility for future releases ? Just keep old releases for these old OS.

[mooms06]

Actually, since 2 of the 3 versions you offers have already net 6 runtimes embedded, my point is moot.

[pomazanbohdan]

Microsoft's policy is to update from 6 to a newer one, in particular 7, this can be seen from the same conditions in the winget

[mooms06]

Microsoft's policy is to update from 6 to a newer one, in particular 7, this can be seen from the same conditions in the winget

No, here it's the .NET and .NET Core Support Policy

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core

As you can see, supported version 6 and 8, 7 is already out of support.

[pomazanbohdan]

6 - November 12, 2024

[mooms06]

Yes.

Even versions are LTS, and odd versions are STS.

Customers can choose Long Term Support (LTS) releases or Standard Term Support (STS) releases. The quality of all releases is the same. The only difference is the length of support. LTS releases get free support and patches for 3 years. STS releases get free support and patches for 18 months.

[Klocman]

I will move BCU to .NET 8 in v6.0 whenever that happens (most likely not for a few releases) and officially drop support for everything under Win10.

I'll have to add a legacy version section to the readme so people can find the latest versions supported in a given OS I suppose.

[mooms06]

That seems the most reasonable choice.