Plenty of systems still use .NET 8/9 today. It's very likely that there are some websites that we use daily running on .NET 8 with ASP. Microsoft never barged in our server room and forced us to upgrade .NET, but YMMV.
Godot still defaults to .net 8
I think a lot of this stems from the fact that we live in a "why we can't have nice things" world. As long as there are bad actors, there will need to be security updates. So if you don't update, and Microsoft no longer provides security updates for that version, you're in quite the bind.
If I wrote a useful library a few years back and it targeted net472 and net6.0 then… it just keeps targeting those? I can still use it from a net48 and net10.0 app just fine?
Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime
by metaltyphoon on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @07:38PM
(#50448350)
Yes you can, so I don't know what OP is complaining about.
Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime
by nikbackm on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @03:34AM
(#50451014)
The library might behave differently when run under a newer NET version due to breaking changes in NET.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...
No, you cannot use it "just fine". There could be any number of breaking changes to your library between .NET 6 and .NET 10, and you're not guaranteed that a build will catch them. Have you painstakingly reviewed every line of code against every breaking change that Microsoft introduces with every new runtime?
Either you should not be forced to upgrade, or backward compatibility should be guaranteed -- not both. But Microsoft is happy to say "hey, we're going to completely abandon support for every version of .NET every 2 years, and if you can't keep up to date then everything that goes wrong is all your fault." Meanwhile, they have no problem breaking your code.
This essentially kills the possibility of just writing a bunch of small, useful libraries, and having them be useful forever. It is the antithesis of a healthy software ecosystem. Are you really expecting that every single open source library that is referenced by a reference of your references is going to be maintained in the face of breaking changes every 2 years? If not, then upgrading your version of .NET is just a gamble that things won't randomly break. But you must upgrade, or you're a bad developer who's leaving your apps vulnerable and every automated security checking system in the world will yell at you about how awful you are. You must upgrade everything you have ever written every two years, and hope that every library you've ever depended on does the same, or you are putting yourself at risk of some breaking change sneaking its way in, or leaving yourself vulnerable to a critical security issue that Microsoft refuses to back-apply.
I cannot understand why I'm the only one shouting from the rooftops about this. It's completely unacceptable to me.