Target .NET Core 3.1

[JamieMagee]

Currently Component Detection targets .NET 6. This was done intentionally to get the benefits of improved file IO performance¹. Unfortunately, .NET 6 is a very new runtime² (released on November 8th 2021) so by targeting .NET 6 we are limiting the consumers of Component Detection to those that have updated in their target runtime very recently.

In comparison, .NET Core 3.1 was released over 2 years ago³, but is still an LTS release that will be supported until December 3rd 2022⁴. By targeting .NET Core 3.1 we can increase the potential userbase of Component Detection, while minimising the performance regression.

An alternative is to target .NET Standard 2.0, but this would also limit us to using C# 7.3 and would require more major refactoring.

Footnotes

1. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/file-io-improvements-in-dotnet-6/ ↩

2. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-6/ ↩

3. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-1/ ↩

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