When is the .net pace of change going to slow down, or the length of time to support a given .net version going to increase?

Question

Now that .NET has begun to stabilize (and we're getting close to .NET 10), I'm finding that organizations are having a hard time keeping up with the release versions of .NET - 3 years isn't enough time for them to develop and place into production only to find that they're almost out of support.

Is there going to be a time when a .NET version will be supported by Microsoft for a longer period of time, say 6 years, or 10 years? Or the pace of new versions will be slowed down to one per every 2 years or something like that?

Answer 1

the LTS model is pretty common. Even if .net 22 LTS is only bug fixes for .net 20 LTS, maintaining multiple releases of the same library is expensive. The current LTS model requires maintaining 2 current releases and one future release. As it becomes more mature, I'd expect fewer code changes between releases. Maybe even auto update in the build tools.

as security is now an issue, you should be upgrading you code regularly, nuget packages especially. If you do not have a release cycle for security fixes you should.

Most likely .net core will get long term support when it matures like .net 4.* and is replaced by another framework.