(FEEDBACK WANTED): Support .NET 8 and .NET Standard 2.0

[activescott]

@mega5800 I was contacted by a lessmsi user who has migrated lessmsi to .NET 8 and .NET Standard 2.0 (maybe also see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/library-guidance/cross-platform-targeting) and provided me access to his code changes. I think this is valuable to contributors if we just keep lessmsi using the latest platform libraries, but honestly I'm not very confident.

Do you think it's valuable to users and/or contributors if we migrate lessmsi to .NET 8 and .NET Standard 2.0?

Would it still work on the operating systems we support according to the Supported Windows Versions section of the README?

If so, are you interested in contributing it? Happy to provide you access to his code (and he also said that would be fine).

[mega5800]

Hi @activescott.
Thank you for considering my input for this valuable suggestion.

We are currently using .Net 4.8, which is supported on the next os:

Client Operating Systems:
Windows 10 (version 1507 and later)
Windows 8.1
Windows 7 SP1

Server Operating Systems:
Windows Server 2025
Windows Server 2022
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server, version 1709, 1803, 1809
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows Server 2008 SP2

From what I could find, .Net 8 is supported by a shorter list of OS:
Windows 11
Windows 10 (version 1909 or later)
Windows Server 2022, 2019, and 2016

This is an obvious decision between supporting existing users and upgrading the utilised .net version.
From one hand, migrating to .Net 8 might break LessMSI for clients with legacy systems.
From the other hand, however, we will leverage the benefits of .Net 8 by using it as the framework for LessMSI.

I think the best approach would be to split LessMSI into two versions - Legacy & Current versions.
The legacy version will be based on .Net 4.8 for legacy users, where as the current version will be based on the latest LTS .net version (could be .Net 8 now or something else in the future).

Please let me know your thoughts about this suggestion.