(Considering) Moving .net4 -> .net5. End of Windows XP/Vista support.

[KAMIKADzE]

Subj says it all - I'm considering to stop supporting Windows XP/Vista. This will not happen tomorrow or any time soon, I might even discard this move at all, at the moment I'm just considering it.
.net4, used by Launcher (it uses not only .net4, but that's not relevant in this context), was released back in 2010. My main reason to not upgrade the framework to the newer versions was the cornerstone of Windows XP support. Apart of better asynchronous code support, newer versions do not contain a whole lot of improvements, that would justify the drop of Windows XP support (IMO).
Not that long ago Microsoft has decided to reunify, previously split .net, into a single framework under the name of .net5, which is scheduled for release sometime in November 2020, with further versions increase by +1 each following year (e.g.: .net6 in November 2021, etc.).
You could ask "Why are you even considering to move, while everything works fine?", which will be a valid question to ask. I cannot give you a definitive answer on this one, yet. There are a lot of claims, regarding .net5, but how valid they are I'm yet to find out. In theory it should simplify cross-platform development (Mac, Android, Linux support for Launcher? who knows...), reduce the amount of resources used by the framework (this one I highly doubt...), higher performance, better interoperability (while I have no doubt about other platforms, I'm not so sure about Windows), and more. Also if all claims are valid, then someone might actually make it usable on Windows XP (not that I think that someone will do so, but just in theory). This move will also allow me to add some new features in the future, that might be extremely difficult to create from zero on the current framework.
As I've already mentioned - I'm not sure yet if I'll eventually move or not, right at this moment I'm downloading preview version of the upcoming .net5 and will be looking at it over some period of time. My main concern is over how Windows-specific things are used there, and how easily it'll be to convert whole project from .net4 to .net5. I'm in full control of most of the codebase used in Launcher, and I plan to replace those few non-Microsoft 3rd party libraries in the nearest future anyway, but that still leaves Microsoft itself, so I'll be inspecting changes and how those will reflect onto their use by Launcher. If everything will be easy-peasy then my only concern will be Windows XP/Vista support, which is one of the main reasons for this thread to begin with. If there will be a whole lot of other problems with move to .net5 then I'll make sure to notify you and I might skip this move even if everyone will be OK with the drop of XP/Vista support, so it's too early to say anything definitively, but having said that - preview is not a final version, so things might change, not even to mention future .net6 and so on and so forth, at some point this question will arise again, the question of whether I should end the support of Windows XP/Vista.

tl/dr:
I'm considering to end Windows XP/Vista support in like 6 months or so, if everything will be great with .net5
Vote on the pool whether you're using Windows XP/Vista and Launcher on it, this will influence on my decision. Feel free to leave your thoughts and concerns in this thread.

[KAMIKADzE]

Forgot to post an update regarding this move.
First of all it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in XP/Vista support, so probably Launcher will migrate to the new .net version at some point, but not in the nearest future. There are few things missing in .net 5, that I'd need to rework in order to migrate Launcher to it, moreover even devs acknowledge that .net 5 was a rushed released (due to pandemic) and doesn't contain all of what was planned (postponed till .net 6), +my constant lack of time on top of that lead me to the conclusion that the move is not on time, so I'll be looking into it again closer to the .net 6 release. I'll leave this thread open, so if there will be anyone with any concerns regarding the move - feel free to post your concerns here.

[KAMIKADzE]

Now that .net8 is around the corner, I decided to post a small update regarding the situation...in short it's confusing af
Let's try to make it somewhat sensible. First of all the release schedule of new .net versions has somewhat crystallized, basically around a 1 incremental(major) release each year, with every even number supported for 3 years, so I'm expected to hop on new version, that has questionable backwards-support at least every 2 years.
So far so good, just possibly need to rewrite gazillion lines of code every 2 years, now as current .net devs said they'll drop older OSs with new releases to basically "cleanup the codebase"...ehmm??? what? so the main point of making .net5+ was to make it cross-platform and support many different OSs, and they kind of do support different OSs, but only some selective, that they'll ditch in the future. Sounds even better, now the thing is that it's open-source, so technically someone can rewrite the code to support older OSs, but as far as I can tell - no one is bothered to as of now.

To sum it all up, I have basically 3 options:
1) Remain on .net4, which so far is supported by all newer Windows OSs (even .net2 is), starting from XP.
2) Move to .net6, which supports different platforms, doesn't support XP and will become unsupported itself 12.11.2024. Requires a rewrite of some code.
3) Fork the newest .netX and rewrite it to support all of the OSs that I want. Sounds cool, but realistically would take a lot of time + money (need all of the hardware for all of the platforms to test properly).

So far I think I'll go with option #1, and will wait to see what will happen with the future .net releases and .net6 after 12.11.2024.