.NET 8 Preview 1 | Hacker News Reader

.NET 8 Preview 1

devblogs.microsoft.com

25 pointsripley127 comments

Looks like MS is moving .NET towards smaller, but more frequent updates, similar to a lot of languages as of late. I honestly didn't even know 7 came out, just that AOT was in the works. C# was always a pleasure to work in. VB.NET is fine, but I'd rather write C# any day. I'd love to get some realistic status on .NET usage. I've have to imagine it's really solid, but I'd be interested in how the usage outside of Windows servers and shops with heavy Windows-reliance is like.

> Shall we play a game? How about Simon?

Exactly the kind of reference I like to see in a blog post too :)

I wouldn't say that MS "is moving" the .NET release cadence "towards", it has been quite regular for the last few years already: There is a major version every November, since 2020. And every second one is Long Term Support (.NET 6 is LTS, and .NET 8 will be)

But yes, this is a "modern" cadence of small, frequent releases, and it is expected to continue like that.

The table of releases with dates is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET

> I'd be interested in how the usage outside of Windows servers

If you're doing microservices, web services, queue processing, etc in a .NET version >= 5.0, then hosting on containers or Linux servers is common, even the norm. If you doing AWS Lambdas or Azure functions then the host OS is "IDK, not important, probably a linux"

> I wouldn't say that MS "is moving" the .NET release cadence "towards", it has been quite regular for the last few years already

Welp, that shows my .NET ignorance - thanks for the info!

This release schedule is terrible for low overhead projects. Now instead of relying on something that just works for more than a decade, every single one of them as to be updated and refactored every two years or face lack of support and lack of compatibility with the ecosystem.

Slow down. I feel like I just updated my projects from 3.1 to 6.

You lucky one, plenty of enterprise stuff still stuck in .NET Framework, including some Microsoft products.

Or extend the duration of LTS support. For work we have dozens (if not hundreds now?) of AWS Lambda functions written in C# and the short duration of LTS has us considering switching to Python so that updating our code in order to stay on a version AWS supports doesn't become an every two year task.

(And making the upgrade is a requirement because you cannot deploy updates to a Lambda if it's targeting a runtime version that's not in current support from Microsoft.)

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