Microsoft has announced that support will be ended for version 3.1 of the .NET Core Framework on December 13, 2022. This is a long- term support (LTS) version, and Microsoft says users should upgrade applications based on .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 6.0 to continue to receive support.

.NET Core was launched as an open source project that Microsoft described on launch as "a modular implementation that can be used in a wide variety of verticals, scaling from the data center to touch based devices, is available as open source, and is supported by Microsoft on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX."

Microsoft .NET Core Framework version 3.1 was originally released in 2019, and as a long-term support release is supported for three years after the release date. Versions that aren't launched as LTS releases are only supported for 18 months. The latest LTS version of .NET is 6.0, which will be supported until November 12, 2024.

Dominique Whittaker, senior program manager for .NET at Microsoft, said that customers using the 3.1 version should move to .NET 6 or 7 to still receive official support and security patches. The plan is that .NET 7.0, will be released this coming November as a non-LTS version.

Applications running under .NET Core 3.1 will still work after the end of support date, but with no further patching customers may be exposed to potential security flaws.

There's an official compatibility guide that developers can use to check whether their applications will have problems when upgrading, along with an open-source tool called Upgrade-Assistant that aims to help with the process of upgrading. The tool checks the application's code for incompatibilities and whether the app is affected by breaking changes. It also fixes problems it finds in the code where possible, and updates the project files.

More Information

.NET 6 Compatibility Checker

.NET Upgrade Assistant On GitHub

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