Microsoft.NET is a powerful language framework that underpins many applications in the business and enterprise world. Liberty Fox has been building applications on top of Microsoft.NET for almost 12 years and is very proficient in the toolset. Microsoft recently announced that certain versions of the NET Framework (4.5.2, 4.6 and 4.6.1) will be reaching end of support this month. This is part of a greater effort to sunset the entire .NET Framework itself in lieu of the newer .NET Core framework which Microsoft considers to be its future. In Liberty Fox’s experience, some of the versions that are reaching end of support are quite active in many companies’ systems today and need to be carefully considered.
So, what does this mean to you? If you or your company has an application, custom built or off the shelf, that you are aware was built with the Microsoft.NET Framework, now would be a good time to review what version it is built with and prepare for the end of support. Following on from Leon Degtar’s post in the last newsletter, this directly ties to the ‘technical debt’ of an organization. When an application is not maintained and its underlying framework reaches end of support, it potentially opens up clients and customers to security concerns and risk as the application continues to age in an unsupported state. An appropriate path forward would be to have a development company revisit these applications and consider what level of effort is needed to bring them onto a more current and supported version of their underlying framework. This consultative assessment is something that Liberty Fox does quite frequently and would be happy to support as the concern arises.
Keeping systems and applications up-to-date is a necessary and important activity in a company’s lifecycle, yet custom software is commonly overlooked in that process. Regardless of whether your custom applications are built with Microsoft.NET or not, please always be aware of the associated support and risks of those applications so that your company can continue to grow and thrive!
