Upcoming .NET 8 migration

[kirill-ivlev]

Summary

We are currently working on migrating our Azure Pipelines Agent to use .NET 8 instead of .NET 6. This migration will result in some legacy systems being deprecated and falling outside of support.

Why?

.NET 6 is approaching its end of life, and we will soon be unable to deliver critical security updates.

Versioning

We will begin releasing a new major version of the agent (v4), while continuing to provide new features and fixes for the current mainstream version (v3) until end of this year.

Operating system support

removed
added

• Linux
  • x64
    • Debian 10+ 11 & 12
    • Fedora 36+ 39 & 40
    • openSUSE 15+ 15.5 & 15.6
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7+ 8 & 9
    • SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 SP2 or later 15.5
    • Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04, 20.04 ,18.04,16.04
    • Azure Linux 2.0
    • Oracle Linux 7 and higher 8 & 9
  • ARM64
    • Debian 10+ 11 & 12
    • Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04, 20.04 ,18.04
  • Alpine x64
    • Alpine Linux 3.13 and higher 3.17 to 3.20
• macOS
  • x64
    • macOS 10.15 "Catalina"
    • macOS 11.0 "Big Sur"
    • macOS 12.0 "Monterey"
    • macOS 13.0 "Ventura"
    • macOS 14.0 "Sonoma"
    • macOS 15.0 "Sequoia"
  • ARM64
    • macOS 11.0 "Big Sur"
    • macOS 12.0 "Monterey"
    • macOS 13.0 "Ventura"
    • macOS 14.0 "Sonoma"
    • macOS 15.0 "Sequoia"
• Windows
  • Client OS
    • Windows 7 SP1 [ESU]
    • Windows 8.1
    • Windows 10
      • 21H2
      • 11 23H2, 11 22H2, 10 22H2, 11 21H2
    • Windows 11
      • 10 21H2, 10 1809, 10 1607
  • Server OS
    • Windows Server 2012 or higher

[avivanoff]

Still no Windows ARM64?

[geekzter]

@avivanoff We expect to have Windows arm64 available before April.

[dp-robleady]

Are self-hosted agents running the v3 agent officially supported on Ubuntu 24.04 now, or do we need to wait for v4?

[blushingpenguin]

@dp-robleady It works for me

[dp-robleady]

@dp-robleady It works for me

It seems to work here too, but the documentation doesn't mention it yet.

[sphanley]

Does anyone know if there's been any sort of communication around whether the 4.x agents are considered stable or recommended yet? I see that they've been releasing in parallel with the 3.x releases for some time, but this issue is still open, and I haven't been able to find any sort of announcement or even much documentation acknowledging the 4.x releases or encouraging the switch. I'd very much appreciate any clarity that can be provided as to what's recommended at this point.

[dp-robleady]

Does anyone know if there's been any sort of communication around whether the 4.x agents are considered stable or recommended yet? I see that they've been releasing in parallel with the 3.x releases for some time, but this issue is still open, and I haven't been able to find any sort of announcement or even much documentation acknowledging the 4.x releases or encouraging the switch. I'd very much appreciate any clarity that can be provided as to what's recommended at this point.

This page https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/v4-agent would suggest the v4 agents are now stable, and the latest tags will now point you to a v4 download rather than v3, but I agree that a proper announcement would help. The installation guide for the Linux self hosted agents https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/linux-agent still hasn't been updated to reference v4 :-(

We have hit this issue #5104 with v4 agents, which caused us to roll back some machines v3, however it looks like that may have been fixed now.

[arlt197]

Aha

[Namoshek]

Since .NET 6 is already end of life and it would be advisable to update the runtime to a newer version, it would make sense to update the agents to the respective v4. However, the documentation states that the v4 is incompatible with Azure DevOps Server. Is this still true or is the documentation outdated?