Yes, the names are confusing

Posted Aug 28, 2024 8:18 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Huh? by epa
Parent article: WineHQ to take over Mono

The support situation is also notable. .NET Core, now just called ".NET" is getting new versions with a set cadence, the way you get new versions of something like Fedora. There's a release every year or so which adds and improves features, half of them expire after 18 months, the others after three years, so you're on a constant treadmill to upgrade the .NET apps in a business, refreshing them every few years. Later this year .NET 9 will ship which most customers won't really use except in toy projects, then in 2025 .NET 10 with three years will get more usage.

But, .NET Framework 4 on the one hand doesn't get these frequent feature bumps, but then also doesn't have a fixed lifetime, .NET Framework 4.8.1 is still supported, code people wrote maybe 5-10 years ago, with mostly bug fixes and small tweaks.

I think it's entirely possible that Microsoft abandons .NET ("core") altogether at some point, but .NET Framework remains supported for years after that. The support for .NET Framework resembles the "Old" Microsoft, the one which made their new Windows NT in the 1990s use APIs which were often inconsistent and confusing because that maximized compatibility with Windows 3.x software, rather than the newer Microsoft which is always in a hurry to tell you that a product has lifetime expired and so that's why a week after your organisation settled on that software it no longer works.

Yes, the names are confusing

Posted Sep 2, 2024 3:41 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

It is highly unlikely that Microsoft is abandoning .NET and even less likely that they go back to .NET Framework.

The cash cow for Microsoft these days is Azure and the cloud. It is more important than Windows. So, .NET needs to be cross-platform at least on the server side. It needs to run in containers--in Docker and Kubernetes. Framework 4.x does none of that. The active releases of .NET ( versions 6+ ) are what matter to Microsoft.

Microsoft has continued Mono dev within .NET and they are not turning that over to anybody. The fact that they are punting "The Mono Project" to Wine, which is still defined as as clone of Framework, should tell you all you need to know.

Microsoft does not care about .NET Framework ( stuck on 4.x for years as you say ) and they care even less for the Open Source implementation of it ( The Mono Project ).