Staring a new .NET Project? Stick to LTS Please
I frequently find myself advising clients when they are setting up a new project. Always ensure, you are on the side of ‘LTS’. Please.
LTS stands for Long Term Support. Here are a few common places where you see this thing.
Every developer has his own style of managing versions, introducing breaking changes and maintaining existing libraries.
This has implications for every other developer who is using these libraries.
Even more so with major libraries like .NET and Node JS. Recently, I wrapped up a project for a client. For reasons best known to himself, the previous developer had decided to build the entire project with .NET 5.0. Less than a year later, Microsoft introduced .NET 6.0 which was declared LTS.
And.
Microsoft immediately declared that .NET 5.0 is out of support!
Now, this did not kill our project, of course. Our web app kept running just fine. Unfortunately, we found ourselves constantly annoyed with endless warnings from package manager and visual studio that we are on an ‘OUT OF SUPPORT’ version of dot net. Soon, other libraries started warning us that we should migrate to .NET 6.0.
Eventually, we had no choice but to migrate to .NET 6.0 which went about smoothly. However, we go lucky. A lot of times, there will be breaking changes if there was code that was incompatible with the newer library.
So, if you are a developer hired to being a new project. Or, a project manager discussing with a new client, stick with LTS.
However, if you are feeling adventurous, and have plenty of money and time to spare. Please. Be my guest. Use STS.
I work as a full-time freelance coding tutor. Hire me at UpWork or Fiverr or Stack Overflow. My personal website is here. Find more of my art at Behance and Unsplash and ArtStation. Also, I have a Podcast about everyday life. And, a 2nd Podcast, where I talk about freelancing. And, I have one more podcast, where, I talk about movies.
