.NET support for Windows 7 and 8.1 will end in January 2023

[richlander]

.NET support for Windows 7 and 8.1 will end in January 2023

Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are currently supported with .NET 6. They will not be supported with .NET 7+.

Windows 7 is only supported (with .NET 6) for organizations that have purchased Extended Security Updates (ESU). Windows 7 will be supported for those organizations until the ESU offering ends, which is January, 2023. At that time, Windows 7 will no longer be supported with .NET 6.

Windows 8.1 is supported until January 2023. At that time, Windows 8.1 will no longer be supported with .NET 6.

Windows Server 2012/R2 ESU will start mid-way through the .NET 7 lifecycle, in October 2023. We will offer support for Windows Server 2012/R2 throughout .NET 7 and .NET 8, assuming you have purchased ESU updates. We recommend that you do not install .NET 7 on Windows Server 2012/R2 unless you have a migration plan (within a year of .NET 7 General Availability) to a newer operating system or plan to purchase Windows Server ESU.

Windows Server 2016+ will be supported throughout .NET 7 and .NET 8.

We encourage you to migrate to Windows 10 or 11 if you would like to use .NET 7 or later on Windows Client.

[huoyaoyuan]

Will code for these OS deleted? Given that a lot of people still use unsupported OS, application authors often support as much OS as they can.

[John0King]

MS can't wait to killing Win7/win8 ? People want to use C# as a programming language , but MS mke it to be a product!

[richlander]

Will code for these OS deleted?

For the .NET 6 servicing branch, absolutely not. For .NET 7 (main), TBD. Once main switches to .NET 8, very likely.

MS can't wait ...

We didn't review this plan with the Windows team. We looked at the same published dates you have access to (the ones I linked to) and did a reasonable analysis of them to come to this plan.

We don't support OS versions past their due date. There are only two cases where we have supported an OS version for an extended period: Windows 7 and Ubuntu 16.04. I'm certain the same thing will happen with each Ubuntu LTS. Turns out Ubuntu is popular. Who knew? Our approach is actually pretty principled, documented, and consistent. It's also not biased to Windows. It's definitely biased to customer usage patterns.

[John0King]

We don't support OS versions past their due date.

This decision will not help MS to selling new windows, but do help developers to leave MS product!

Is there any win7 stuff stop your team to develop new .net version ? if there not or only a little , why drop the support so quikly when no other { product from other company / programming languages / platfroms } do that .

[richlander]

It's very likely that .NET 6 will continue to function the same/correctly on Windows 7 past this date. We're NOT going to do anything intentional to prevent that. There are no builds we are turning off. Windows 7/10/11 are one binary build, as demonstrated by our website.

The effective change is that companies won't be able to call Microsoft for support anymore for .NET 6 on Windows 7 to seek a fix to whatever problem they have. I don't know if the other examples you are thinking about have an organization like Microsoft Support to help their users. If not, the comparison doesn't cleanly apply.

[huoyaoyuan]

I think it's better to claim it as "works but unsupported". As an open source project, there will still be chances for community members to fix problems specific to Windows 7.

Currently there are only 5 uses of Environment.IsWindows8OrAbove in corelib. For NT6 I don't expect there to be much hard problems. And unlike .NET Framework, .NET Core isn't integrated into OS.

[jkotas]

Currently there are only 5 uses of Environment.IsWindows8OrAbove in corelib.

There are more than hundred places where we have workarounds for Windows 7 (most of them are in tests).

I expect that once we turn off the Windows 7 testing, it is going to regress pretty quickly. I do not expect that the community will be interested in nor able to keep up with these regression.

[jkotas]

Note that we are deleting the support for other OSes that are EOL too. For example, dotnet/runtime#60138 .

[richlander]

When we remove support for Windows 7, we'll be deleting the support for it from the codebase. That's our policy and it will make us more efficient. We haven't decided if this deletion will be in the .NET 7 or 8 tree. It's likely that .NET 6 will work on Windows 7 forever, but will (obviously) be unsupported.

[Genbox]

There are more than hundred places where we have workarounds for Windows 7 (most of them are in tests).

Is there a way to identify these places?

[AaronRobinsonMSFT]

One way is to look for uses of https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/99e58d55c1f02e242f9cbe298d4f31b1a1563207/src/tests/Common/CoreCLRTestLibrary/Utilities.cs#L70

The next would be https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/99e58d55c1f02e242f9cbe298d4f31b1a1563207/src/libraries/Common/tests/TestUtilities/System/PlatformDetection.Windows.cs#L23

There are likely others involved #defines and other tricks. Searching for various sequences involving "win", "windows", and "7" would be the place to start.

[Genbox]

Note that we are deleting the support for other OSes that are EOL too. For example, dotnet/runtime#60138 .

Note that 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave) today account for 10% of macOS users. Likewise, Windows 7 and 8.1 account for about 16% of Windows users.

I'm not saying it is good or bad. It is just data in case anyone is wondering about the potential impact.

Source: Statcounter

[richlander]

Good info @Genbox. Data is always good.

I want to make a more general observation ... let's say you have an app and you want to sell it to or support in Windows 7. That's great. We're not going to block you from doing that. Do what you need to do.

However, you already have to accept that the Windows team is not supporting your users on Windows 7. Your users are not receiving patches for security, crashes, timezone updates, or new hardware. Why is is such a big deal that the .NET team won't support them either? It's a much bigger deal that the operating system isn't supported. To my mind, it is incongruent to expect the .NET Team to continue supporting .NET (in a given environment) when the more foundational operating system is already end-of-life. You should just accept that the environment isn't getting any more care and feeding.

Again, we're NOT going to add blocks on .NET 6 to stop it working on Windows 7. Doing so would be mean and very unfriendly. .NET 6 should work fine (in an unsupported configuration) on Windows 7 well into the future.