I was watching this InfoQ webcast yesterday (about refactoring legacy systems – good one actually, you should go see it) and along the way the support expiredate of .NET 2.0 was mentioned… I was a little surprised to know that the date has been set to 2011 so I doublechecked today and it’s not just for fun: Mainstream support expires in April 2011 with extended support until 2016.
What does it mean to us developers? Well… Nothing much really in the short run but it is a disaster waiting to happen for the enormous amount of mission critical .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 code in production around the globe. When Microsoft decides to deprecate a version there will be no service packs for one. That means that if i.e. new security vulnerabilities are discovered along the way Microsoft has every right to vow against a hotfix or a security update – because you knew (or should have known) well in advance that you should have planned for an upgrade to a newer framework.
For the majority of systems around it’s a small change to alter the “Target Framework” setting to a newer version of the framework and get rid of the warnings it generates. Heck: If you’ve stuck with .NET 2.0 and are still doing “foreach” every time you need to iterate over something you better get started anyway or find someone ready to pay you to do so I just need to raise the flag because if I didn’t see it coming lots of other developers haven’t seen it either. Spread the word :o)
Related link: Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ
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