Updating ASP.NET Core

Question

Hello .NET Community!

I have been tasked with updating ASP.NET Core SEoL (multiple versions: 5.02, 5.04, 5.09, 5.012, 5.0.17) on multiple servers in our production environment. These versions were all discovered during a Tenable scan in the ".\dotnet\shared" folder I'm not familiar enough with ASP.NET, .NET, or ASP.NET Core to know what impact updating these various versions will have on any applications that require these components. Obviously, I don't want to negatively impact our production systems but I'm not sure where to begin. Are newer versions backwards compatible? Is there a method to determining what versions are actively being used? Is this just a simple update that I'm overthinking the solution to? I would greatly appreciate the advice and recommendations of anyone more familiar with this process. Thank you for your reading! Dan

Answer 1

asp.net core is a side by side update. that is a folder each created for each version. by default an asp.net core built for <major>.<minor> will run the lastest patch version of the <major>.<minor> unlike previous .net frameworks, for the asp.net core to run a later major/minor version it must be recompiled. when installing a patch version, it generally safe to delete the earlier versions.

while 5.0.17 is the lastest version of net 5, it has been out of support since May 2022. .net 6 support will end this November. you should probably have a plan to upgrade all your asp.net sites to net 8.

there is no handy way to tell which .net versions are active on a server. if you have list open file support, you could check which .net core folders are in use.