.NET
Gone But Not Forgotten: The Deprecated Technologies of .NET
This article is part of a series on Migrating from .NET Framework to .NET, also available as a chapter in our free, downloadable eBook
The clock is ticking for some essential .NET Framework features that are being transitioned to end-of-life. Microsoft’s .NET 10 is here and brings some major changes that can significantly impact your organization.
Migration is unavoidable which means you’ll likely experience some growing pains. Fortunately, you’ve got time before .NET Framework and .NET Core will be fully deprecated. But that doesn’t mean you should wait to start planning. Spending a minute now will save you hours of headaches later!
What’s Happening?
Microsoft ended long-term support for the most recent release of Core (3.1.7) around December 2022. When it comes to your servers, .NET (.NET 5 to .NET 10) runs on all supported versions of Windows. This means you won’t have to update Windows Server until your version reaches end-of-life (EOL). Once the server OS reaches EOL (check out this schedule), you’ll have to carefully consider the migration path you’ll take to update based on your applications and their dependencies.
But before the sand runs out and these technologies go the way of the dinosaurs, will your plan be ready? Let’s review the technologies that are gone but not forgotten by the new .NET to help you plan.
ASP.NET Web Forms
| Impacts | Web Applications |
| Replacement | ✘ No Replacement Microsoft recommends ASP.NET Core Blazor or Razor Pages. |
| Problem | ⚠️Full Rewrite Required You’ll have to rewrite your applications from scratch to get away from ASP.NET Web Forms, though this will likely be unnecessary for many years. |
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
| Impacts | Network-connected Applications Any application that uses service-oriented architecture/API to connect to other applications or services over a network where the service endpoint is built using WCF. |
| Replacement | ⚠️Community/ Open-source Alternative The open-source community has created CoreWCF, now supported by Microsoft. It offers an option to migrate but is not a full implementation. Microsoft also recommends gRPC as an alternative to WCF. Visual ReCode significantly simplifies this transition. |
| Problem | ⚠️Full Rewrite or Community Reliance You’ll either have to rewrite your APIs from scratch to convert to the ASP.NET Core Web API, or you need to port your code to CoreWCF and risk losing some features you might need. |
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
| Impacts | Applications with Workflows Any application or service that uses workflow libraries (the tools around building and running workflows). |
| Replacement | ✘ No Official Replacement ⚠️Community/ Open-source Alternative The open-source community has created CoreWF. It isn’t a full implementation at this time, and is not an easy drop-in replacement like CoreWCF. |
| Problem | ⚠️Full Rewrite or Community Reliance You’ll either have to find, learn, and rewrite code from scratch to a third-party, “off-the-shelf” library, or you’ll need to port your code to CoreWF and risk losing some features you might need. |
.NET Standard
.NET Standard essentially serves as a transition between all the .NET implementations prior to .NET (Framework, Core, Mono, etc.). For now, no new versions of .NET Standard will be released, but current versions of .NET, along with all future versions will continue to support .NET Standard 2.1 and earlier.
So What?
The longer your organization waits to plan its migration the messier and more difficult it will get. Deprecation will sneak up on you sooner than you realize.
Hey, I know we’ve covered a lot today, and to keep up with what’s deprecated and what’s not, make sure to bookmark this page to revisit later! In fact, it’s a chapter in our .NET Migration Guide, which is packed with info on managing dependencies, implementing microservices, integrating .NET into your CI/CD pipeline, and more. Sign up for your free copy today!
