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Comment by D_Guidi | Hacker News Reader

Legacy net framework Will stop with 4.8, as said some months ago

EDIT: more on this here https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/update-on-net-core-3-0...

I missed that, and that would be a pretty big deal. I thought the message was of a side by side evolution, with full framework getting features possibly with a delay.

Key pull quotes in this article specifically:

> There will be just one .NET going forward

> Additionally, we wanted to clearly communicate that .NET 5 is the future for the .NET platform.

Well, it is not really the case, there will be still two frameworks, just one isn't going to be developped anymore (full .net 4.8). The way I read that sentence initially was them merging the two into one.

>Well, it is not really the case, there will be still two frameworks, just one isn't going to be developped anymore (full .net 4.8).

If "one isn't going to be developed anymore" there there will be just one framework.

"Being" here means what's the official worked-on implementation. Not merely existing, obviously the code for 4.8 wont go anywhere, nor will existing deployments suddenly vanish.

What they are saying at MS Build is 4.8 will be supported "forever" because there is too much code depending on .NET Framework, but new feature development is going into .NET Core 3+. By the time they reach .NET 5, they will have unified .NET Core, .NET Standard and Xamarin. They are skipping version "4" to avoid confusion with the second .NET Framework 4.8.

I took "forever" to mean that they would still be issuing security patches to 4.8, for example. Given all that I don't know why you're insisting on phrasing it like that. There is only one future, sure. But you seem to be making it sound like 4.8 has a planned obsolescence date or something and Microsoft is saying the exact opposite.

When 4.8 is installed, 4.7 is going away. Here .net 5 will not replace .net 4.8, it will exist side by side (if I understand correctly). That's two frameworks to me.

The VB6 runtime is still installed on Windows 10, but no one (should) considers that a viable Framework to target in 2019.

Maybe a better analogy is that .NET Framework 1.x and .NET Framework 2-4.x are side-by-side installed still in Windows 10. If you wanted you could still target .NET 1.0 and it will run in an entirely different runtime (.NET 1.x and 2.x are hugely different). .NET was designed for that sort of side-by-side deployment, they just haven't done it in a while.

Yet I've not met a developer that still sees .NET 1.x as a viable Framework recently. Do you want .NET 4.8 applications to just break? What do you expect here? The "current framework" is always a combination of marketing and support and this article seems pretty clear that all marketing and support effort will be on .NET 5, and .NET 4.8 is "done".

Yes, major versions install side-by-side (except v2-v3) because they aren't perfectly backward compatible and this is necessary for legacy app support. So, you can need all of .NET Framework 1.1, 3.5, and 4.8 now, and in the future .NET 5.x is added to the list.

>> When 4.8 is installed, 4.7 is going away.

That's not true at all. You can run any version of the framework side-by-side all the way back.

You can only have a single 4.x version on the box. They all install into the same folder.

That's just 2 frameworks installed on a machine.

You can have .NET 2 or whatever older on the same machine too.

Doesn't change the fact that .NET 5 will be the single official .NET release onwards, where development efforts will be concentrated, etc. It's not like MS will support 2 different frameworks (except one as a legacy release).

There's no point since .NET Core 3.0 can run desktop applications now.

It will run desktop applications developped for .net core. I don't believe that .net core can run a full framework desktop executable.

It can using the compatibility shim depending on what framework capabilities it requires.

WCF, Remoting, Web Forms, ODP.NET, EF6 UI designers certainly not.

Yes, some of those items are legacy, but not everyone enjoys paying to rewrite stuff from scratch.

All the desktop stuff is only on Windows though, right? If I'm not mistaken this is the first major .NET Core component that is not cross-platform, which is confusing in itself.

Yes, since it's using Windows components like WPF. I dont think they ever had a plan for a cross-platform desktop UI kit.

Xamarin Forms is that.

Isn’t that a clone of WinForms and not WPF?

That's probably a good thing. WinForms is still the nicest GUI development experience out there, sadly...

Not at all, it uses XAML and the same ideas behind WPF.

They explicitly won't support cross-platform efforts for the GUI stuff, as stated on GitHub (though maybe, one day ...).

I suppose their rationale is damage control ("Okay, they get the server, but the desktop is still firmly ours"), but it would certainly keep me from starting a personal project with a Microsoft Framework.

> but the desktop is still firmly ours

At this point I'm guessing that it's because there isn't a strong future for desktop apps written in native code. Even VSCode is written on top of Electron. Good, bad, or indifferent I think that there isn't a lot of point in developing a native GUI framework at this point.

(To be clear - I'm 100% sure that there are a lot of use cases that I'm blithely waving away, but I'm also sure that those use cases are currently being addressed with WinForms, Qt, GNOME, etc, etc, so why should MS invest in Yet Another GUI Framework?)

I wouldn't mind seeing WPF, or a descendent, ported to other platforms. Xamarin Forms, Eto Forms, and a lot of other wrappers already do a lot of that though, if you want cross platform gui from .Net. (god that looks sloppy)

I also tend to agree that for good, or bad, that Electron will probably grow significantly as an application base. Like I see node becoming the defacto runtime for WebAssembly, I see Electron taking that place for WebAssembly + UI. And I don't think it's all that bad.

Even with MS, Electron seems to be their unified UI target for a lot of apps. VS Code, Teams, Azure SQL Studio (or whatever the name is now), and don't see that space shrinking. I'm only surprised that Teams doesn't have an official Linux version.

WinForms is outdated, "replaced" by WPF and I think apps on the Microsoft App Store have to use WPF instead of WinForms.

So it would make sense if they're pushing .Net Core to be cross-platform, that they want to eventually push the Microsoft App Store "buy" button to be cross-platform as well, with a GUI framework to support those apps. Speculation, but .. of course they will want to.

You can't publish WinForms or WPF applications to the Microsoft Store, they've both been replaced. It's only UWP or using MS's tooling to convert Electron apps to UWP.

Only partially, try to run any desktop application that depends on WCF or ODP.NET with it.

wcf works under core (at least most of it), core 3.0 + wcf + windows desktop shim actually makes everything under wcf working again.

Most of it is not good enough.

I don't want to be the one stating on RFP "it kind of works".

The implication I took from this was that it's not good enough now, but they anticipate it being good enough by the point this is released.

Those customers want the existing apps to just run. Some of them, as sometimes happens, don't want to rewrite them.

What is not good enough?

Pick random .NET app using WCF and run it with zero changes on .NET Core.

But that article says:

"Both .NET Framework and .NET Core will move forward, and both will be fully supported"

???

Which is why I found this one confusing... because it essentially says the opposite.

Yep, I've semplified. What I understood from this post is that net framework is in "maintenance mode": probably MS plan a 4.8.1 with but fixes and maybe a 4.9 with some minor updates, but .net core (now simply .net) is the place where new things will be developed.

Here is the post you are looking for, I think ... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-is-the-future...

exactly! "We will continue to both service and support .NET Framework, which includes bug–, reliability– and security fixes."

I don’t see anything in the linked article that supports your conclusion.

Nothing in the article suggests maintenance releases, but MS' history is probably enough for that. The article does definitely state that .Net 5 is the evolution of Core and will be the entire platform going forward. I'm, personally, glad to see Core/Framework/Mono etc rolled into a single version at 5. The previous split versions have been fairly confusing.

yep! this blog post is more clear about future releases: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-is-the-future...

"We will continue to both service and support .NET Framework, which includes bug–, reliability– and security fixes."

Fair enough - but the wealth of documentation for it will continue to exist, as will older applications targetting it. This seems problematic if you want to search for ".NET" (meaning .NET Core).

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