News

As .NET 6 Support Ends, Security Risks Emerge

• By David Ramel
• August 14, 2024

Many Visual Studio developers are looking forward to the debut of .NET 9 in November, but they should also be aware of a potential security issue with .NET 6, which will reach end of support at the same time and could leave apps vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks.

"Continuing to use an unsupported version will expose you to security vulnerabilities," Microsoft said in a blog post last month announcing .NET 6 end of support on Nov. 12, 2024, the date of the company's .NET Conf event where new .NET releases are debuted.

Microsoft will no longer provide updates or technical support for .NET 6, including security fixes, after that date. The company is advising developers to update to .NET 8 to remain supported.

Along with no more security updates and end of technical support, developers can expect these development upon end of support for .NET 6, Microsoft said:

• Getting NETSDK1138 build warnings when targeting .NET 6 from a later SDK.
• Getting "gold bar" warnings in Visual Studio when targeting .NET 6.

Upgrading to .NET 8 before the debut of .NET 9 involves changing the value of the TargetFramework property in a project file to net8.0, along with updating development and hosting environments, which is all covered in Microsoft guidance titled "Upgrade to a new .NET version."

Note that upgrading development environments primarily involves installing a new .NET SDK, which is done automatically by new editions of Visual Studio, so Visual Studio users need only upgrade to a newer version of the IDE. Microsoft guidance says Visual Studio 2022 17.8 or later is required for .NET 8 development. The current version of Visual Studio 2022 is 17.10.5, released on July 25, 2024.