Visual Studio 17.4.5 no older net core targeting

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Answer 1

Hello Horus,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum and thank you for sharing us screenshots to check.

For your description:

I cannot see older net core sdk in projects template (below .net core 2.1).

I notice that you are using Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise version 17.4.5, so it’s true, Visual Studio 2022 doesn’t support older .NET Core(below .NET Core 2.1). This document: Visual Studio 2022 Support for .NET Development has listed the supported .NET implementations:

Visual Studio 2022 supports the following .NET implementations:

.NET Framework versions 4.8.1, 4.8, 4.7.2, 4.7.1, 4.7, and 4.6.2

.NET Core 7.0, 6.0, 5.0, 3.1, 3.0, 2.2, and 2.1.

…

For your question:

Is there any approach similar to making available .Net Framework 4 and 4.5 for VS 2022, or it’s necessary a VSIX.

Like what the above document says, and .NET Framework 4.0 and .NET Framework 4.5 are not listed there.

But perhaps you can try a workaround(before removing/copying files, please back up the related folders/files just in case):

Download the Microsoft.NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies.net45 NuGet package to a clean folder, open it as zip(or edit the file extension to .zip), navigate to its sub-folder(build\.NETFramework\v4.5), copy all of the files/folders to C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.5 folder(you can skip the same files when the process stops on copying and pasting the files). You can try the similar steps for using .NET Framework 4.0.

After performing above operations, please restart VS, and you can either change the project target framework to .NET Framework 4.5 or target to .NET Framework 4.5 when you are creating a new project in VS 2022.

Besides, some old version of .NET Core and .NET Framework are end of life. This document: Servicing - End of life (EOL) has mentioned that:

Your use of out-of-support .NET versions may put your applications, application data, and computing environment at risk. You are strongly recommended to not use out-of-support software.

So I may suggest you try to use a higher version of .NET Framework/.NET/.NET Core or try to update your project(s) to target a higher version of .NET Framework/.NET/.NET Core.

Feel free to contact us, have a nice day.

Sincerely,

Tianyu

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Frank Isaac Soto Martínez 0 Reputation points

2023-02-28T10:06:43.4666667+00:00

First of all thank you very much for your quick attention. It's true that many older versions of .NET Core and the .NET Framework have reached the end of their useful life, but they are still consumed by many applications and services that run in older OS. Using Nuget's .NET Framework packages, I am able to develop applications from versions 2.0 to 4.8, so there is a way to reference development environments outside of lifecycle. So I'm still wondering: Is there a way outside of Visual Studio that allows reference to old versions of .NET Core? Thanks a lot for your time.
Tianyu Sun-MSFT 27,356 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-02-28T12:13:26.0066667+00:00

Hi Horus,

Thanks for your reply.

The same way for .NET Framework doesn’t work for .NET Core. I’m afraid no easy ways(not sure if one certain VSIX works) to use old version of .NET Core(below .net core 2.1) .

If you need to use it, is it acceptable to use previous version of VS for example VS 2017?

Sincerely,

Tianyu
Frank Isaac Soto Martínez 0 Reputation points

2023-03-03T21:26:02.6033333+00:00

I'll try a VSIX approach: it's very expensive having more than one version of VS installed, and itsn't smart to hold and old IDE for the minority of projects... I think that the main goal of VS is being the AIO IDE.

Answer 2

The workaround is based on THOMAS LEVESQUE's .NET Framework approach (https://thomaslevesque.com/2021/11/12/building-a-project-that-target-net-45-in-visual-studio-2022/).
As older .NET Frameworks SDKs are missing from C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework.NETFramework, the same occurs with older .NET Core Templates.

First I must explain the differences between the two approaches. For the .NET Framework it becomes very difficult to obtain the SDKs for each version below 4.5.1, so it is almost mandatory to extract the libraries from the nuget packages of the series: Microsoft.NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies.net(ver), to then extract (as compressed files) the contents of build.NETFramework\v(ver)\ to the local system folder.

But with .NET Core the scenario is somewhat simpler: It's easy to get the SDKs for .NET Core from https://github.com/dotnet/core/tree/main/release-notes/download-archives and install them on our OS without problems. And here comes the problem: Visual Studio 17 looks for the templates for project platform initialization in a folder (C:\Program Files (platform)\dotnet\templates) that does not contain templates from versions prior to .NET Core 3.0. However, these older versions have their own templates inside their respective folders: C:\Program Files (platform)\dotnet\sdk(ver)\Templates.

So, we just have to copy the content of the templates folder (C:\Program Files (platform)\dotnet\sdk(ver)\Templates), to a subdirectory named with the name of the .NET Core version in the global templates folder (C:\Program Files (platform)\dotnet\templates(ver)).

And that's how we're able to build software for .NET Framework versions from 2.0 to 4.8.x (I haven't found a compatible SDK for 1.0) and .NET Core + .NET from 1.0 to 7.x, keeping customers comfortable in their environments, and us as developers with a single version of Visual Studio.

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Visual Studio 17.4.5 no older net core targeting

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