With .NET 6 Support Ending, Security Vulnerabilities Loom -- Visual Studio Magazine

With .NET 6 Support Ending, Security Vulnerabilities Loom

By David Ramel
08/05/2024

While many Visual Studio developers are awaiting the debut of .NET 9 in November, they might want to pay attention to a looming security issue with .NET 6, which will reach end of support at the same time, perhaps leaving apps open to cybersecurity attacks.

"Continuing to use an unsupported version will expose you to security vulnerabilities," Microsoft said in a blog post last month announcing .NET 6 end of support on Nov. 12, 2024, the date of the company's .NET Conf event where new .NET releases are debuted.

Microsoft will no longer provide updates or technical support for .NET 6 after that, even security fixes, with the company advising developers to update to .NET 8 to stay supported.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** .NET Release Timeline *(source: Microsoft).*

Along with no more security updates and end of technical support, developers can expect these development upon end of support for .NET 6, Microsoft said:

Getting NETSDK1138 build warnings when targeting .NET 6 from a later SDK.
Getting "gold bar" warnings in Visual Studio when targeting .NET 6.

Upgrading to .NET 8 before the debut of .NET 9 involves changing the value of the TargetFramework property in a project file to net8.0, along with updating development and hosting environments, which is all covered in Microsoft guidance titled "Upgrade to a new .NET version."

Note that upgrading development environments primarily involves installing a new .NET SDK, which is done automatically by new editions of Visual Studio, so Visual Studio users need only upgrade to a newer version of the IDE. Microsoft guidance says Visual Studio 2022 17.8 or later is required for .NET 8 development. The current version of Visual Studio 2022 is 17.10.5, released on July 25, 2024.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'

The brand-new Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 lets devs specify the AI model they want to use with the baked-in GitHub Copilot, but some are clamoring for more options, such as the latest/greatest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic that is available in VS Code.
SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric in Preview for Faster AI Apps

Microsoft's early embrace of advanced AI in its dev tooling continues apace with the new public preview of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, the company's analytics/data platform.
Microsoft Seeks to Sort & Simplify its Agentic AI Dev Story

The company will infuse multi-agent runtime tech developed in its AutoGen research project into its production-ready Semantic Kernel SDK, both open source.
Uno Platform Unveils 'Hot Design' Tool for Cross-Platform .NET Apps

Uno Platform provided a new take on visual designers for .NET app development, claiming a breakthrough that changes code at runtime rather than the design stage.
Simple k-NN Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of k-nearest neighbors regression to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, k-NN regression is often slightly less accurate, but is very simple to implement and customize, and the results are highly interpretable.