Please establish roadmap for easily switching between .NET Standard and .NET in projects

[SetTrend]

Current Situation

Currently, it's very tedious to switch from a .NET 9 project to a .NET Standard project after realizing that the NuGet package created doesn't need anything beyond .NET Standard.

Numerous errors are displayed, and upgrading the C# language version doesn't get rid of many of these.

Desired Situation

Please, establish a feature roadmap that supports easily switching between current .NET versions and .NET Standard whenever possible.

It should become a snap to switch between both.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

It's unclear what Roslyn could do here. We don't control what's in a particular .net version.

[SetTrend]

Yes, but won't people be deterred if a NuGet package was based on a .NET version that, in the near future, was no more supported?

I'm thinking of corporate users. I ran a number of projects for government where one of the task key points was to update every package to the latest and find successors if there was no version available built with the current .NET version.

[jasonmalinowski]

Not really. If you're consuming a package built against 6.0, but running it in a 9.0 app, you're still running on the 9.0 runtime.

[jasonmalinowski]

(if there are folks out there with that policy....that's a fairly questionable policy.)

[333fred]

Yes, but won't people be deterred if a NuGet package was based on a .NET version that, in the near future, was no more supported?

If they're deterred by .NET 9 packages, then they'll be extra deterred by .NET standard 2.0 packages. .NET Standard is not receiving new versions. The newest version that will ever be is 2.1, which almost no one uses because why would you use 2.1 over .NET Core 3.1. Either you need to support .NET Framework and .NET, in which case you target .NET Standard 2.0, or you don't care about Framework, in which case you target whatever modern version of .NET you feel like, and upgrade when you decide the new language and library features are worth it for you.

It's important to note that while older SDKs may be out of support, using a current SDK to target an older TFM is explicitly supported and just fine. Ie, you can upgrade your sdk to .NET 10 when it comes out, and still build your application for .NET 9.