Important news丨.NET Core 3.1 will end support on December 13 this year

.NET Core 3.1 will end of support on December 13, 2022. Since then, Microsoft
There will no longer be service updates or technical support for .NET Core 3.1 . We recommend migrating to .NET 6 as soon as possible . If you are still using .NET Core 3.1 after the end of the support date, you will need to update your app to .NET 6 or .NET 7 to continue being supported and continue to receive .NET updates.

.NET Core 3.1 applications will continue to run after support ends. They won't change anything. But every security patch in .NET 6 after support ends is a potential documented and unpatched security hole for .NET Core 3.1 applications.

You can learn more about .NET publishing strategies:

Update your application

If your application uses NET Core 3.1, we strongly recommend that you migrate your application to .NET 6 - a supported LTS version. You can download .NET 6 from the .NET website .

If you are an end user, we recommend that you contact the vendor that manages your software to determine if an updated version of the software is required and available. The rest of this article is for software vendors and developers.

Upgrade to .NET 6

Open the project file (.csproj, .vbproj or *.fsproj file).
Change <TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.1</TargetFramework> to <TargetFramework>net6.0</TargetFramework>.

You can also check out the .NET 6 Compatibility Guide .

Update the development environment

In addition to the software you ship to customers, the computer you use for development probably has .NET Core 3.1 installed—either standalone or installed by Visual Studio.

You can check a standalone installation of .NET Core 3.1 from the command line. On a Windows computer, open a command prompt and go to the %ProgramFiles%dotnet folder. On macOS or Linux, open a terminal window.

Then enter the following command: dotnet --list-runtimes

If you are using Visual Studio 2019 16.11 or 17.0 or Visual Studio 2022 17.2, depending on your installed workload, you may also have .NET Core 3.1 installed as a required component of Visual Studio, and you need to be aware of some upcoming related changes.

Starting with the December 2022 Servicing Update for Visual Studio 2019 16.11, Visual Studio 2019 17.0, and Visual Studio 2022 17.2, the .NET Core 3.1 components in Visual Studio will be changed to be unsupported and optional. This means that workloads in Visual Studio can be installed without installing .NET Core 3.1. Note that existing installations will not be affected, and any previously installed workloads and components will remain installed until the component or workload is deselected in the Visual Studio installer. While you can reselect this optional component in Visual Studio and reinstall it, we strongly recommend that you use .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022 to build applications that run on supported .NET runtimes.

Note: If you are migrating your application to .NET 6, some breaking changes may affect you. We recommend that you do a compatibility check first.

Here are some more related resources for you to check out:

.NET download

.NET Compatibility

.NET deployment

.NET Support Policy:

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