I'll be honest, this made me chuckle.

You are not wrong though, and it's quite annoying when hopping between multiple .Net versions. I feel like I have a bit of insight into what it would have been like to be developing in Python during the 2.x to 3.x schism years back.

Never knew this was the case, I thought these enterprisey stacks were all about moving slow and being compatible. Why are they doing this then?

Microsoft has a strong stance of backwards compatibility, but they achieve this by freezing the The Old Thing as much as possible and keeping it working as is.

Then, they come up with The New Thing every few years, which is not backwards compatible and only handles 20% of what the old thing did + a few new things, but they promise this is the future and will eventually have all the features. The Old Thing is always there if you want it, so there's no reason to revolt when this happens.

The New Thing will eventually be replaced by a Newer Thing, get frozen in its current status, and the Newer Thing will be promised to be the future.

A nice example is Windows GUI. The Old Thing is GDI. Then they invented WinForms in .NET, then WinForms was abandonned in favor of WPF, then WPF was abandonned in favor of Metro/Modern/Universal apps, and last I checked they had some new HTML+JS-based stack available. All of these frameworks still work - you can take an app built with any of them and run it on the latest Windows, and you can even build a new App based on any of them and still find resources for it etc. But none of the old ones are getting new features, and MS will steer you to one of the newer ones instead.

The same kind of thing happened with communication frameworks (COM, then WCF, then???), with ORMs (ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, Entity Framework Core) and I'm sure others.

And don't forget about silverlight and frameworks build on top of it (for enterprisy like form apps). That one was one hell of a swamp that almost drowned my friend's startup after MS decided to kill it. Years of hard work went down the drain at a snap of a finger.

This is exactly why I got off the MS merry-go-round. The strategy seems to be to keep developers constantly chasing the Next Thing so they haven't got time to explore alternatives.

I detect a similar strategy with Apple and the app store: make it so that the long tail of small developers can't invest in more than one platform by moving goalposts so frequently you spend any spare cycles you have trying to keep up.