Expedite support for .NET 5.0

[juho-hanhimaki]

Please consider expediting support for .NET 5.0. By the time SF 8.0 is planned to release .NET 5.0 has already gone through a noticeable period of its support lifetime and the focus in .NET ecosystem will be transitioning to the upcoming .NET 6.0.

.NET 5.0 surely didn't come by surprise. The release schedule was announced May 2019. First go-live (supported) version RC1 was shipped September 13th 2020. I feel the SF team should have prepared for .NET 5.0 launch well in advance and released a supported version the same week as .NET 5.0 was released as has been done by some other Microsoft products such as Application Insights SDK.

Actually we had started developing .NET 5.0 services in September when the first production supported .NET 5.0 release was made. After it was finally shared by SF team on November that support for .NET 5.0 is not planned for a long time I was shocked.

I think the importance of modern .NET needs to be re-evaluated by SF team. It really is where all the innovation is in the .NET space. Offering anything else than first class support is bad for customers and discourages investment in the use of product.

Also if you're a customer and .NET 5.0 support is important for you please let the team know it.

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Assignees: /cc @microsoft/service-fabric-triage

[mfmadsen]

.Net 5.0 support is important for us as well.

[WhitWaldo]

.NET 5.0 support is quite important for us, particularly because of the significant performance gains across the board that can be achieved with little else than changing the target framework and updating the relevant packages.

[LeroyK]

I'm quite surprised that Azure App Service gets support for .NET 5.0 at release time and Service Fabric doesn't. I have the feeling that Microsoft is winding down resources for Service Fabric. The releases contain only small features, issues stay open for a long time, and this repo isn't up-to-date (having 2 year old code).

Are there currently any specific issues with .NET 5.0 on SF clusters?

[tuhland]

Adding my voice to this request.

And I can also confirm, that the whole situation looks very much like typical MS moving on to the next new shiny. Which I've seen quite a lot in my time.

[WhitWaldo]

To be fair, on yesterday's community call, the Service Fabric team spoke to this issue and acknowledged that the ball had been dropped here. @masnider cited an internal API in .NET that was used to load libraries and hook things up that introduced a bit of a breaking change for Service Fabric support and has impacted their timelines. He spoke as well to the state of things on this repo, that work is done on another repo which is why pull requests aren't often accepted here. That continues to be a work in progress to migrate everything to work in the open.

A consistent theme from the team is that Microsoft has not been winding down any support for Service Fabric and that it does remain a priority as it's used internally by many of their customers.

@LeroyK I personally wouldn't recommend you do so, given that my local dev cluster started fielding all sorts of NotSupportedExceptions on the returns for Service Remoting calls per my issue here. A mere rollback to .NET Core 3.1 with no other changes resolved all the exceptions.

[vladislav-karamfilov]

Having SF 7.2 not supporting .NET 5.0 is affecting us too. We had the plan to migrate to .NET 5.0 by the end of next week (the main reason is being able to benefit on the perf improvements and some new APIs) but the news that SF 7.2 doesn't support it breaks our plan to pieces. I consider 7.1 as not supporting .NET 5.0 too (especially after what @WhitWaldo said about the internal API for loading libs). Please reconsider this - there will be many SF customers that need to upgrade to .NET 5.0 and this will be a major disappointment to not be able to do so in the near future.

[athinanthny]

@vladislav-karamfilov @WhitWaldo We have published blogpost for latest 7.2 refresh release where we added Preview support for .NET 5 apps on Windows, GA timeline for Windows and finally when support for .NET apps on Linux in "Key Announcements" section. Release schedule page is also updated here.

[vladislav-karamfilov]

@vladislav-karamfilov @WhitWaldo We have published blogpost for latest 7.2 refresh release where we added Preview support for .NET 5 apps on Windows, GA timeline for Windows and finally when support for .NET apps on Linux in "Key Announcements" section. Release schedule page is also updated here.

This is great news, @athinanthny! We'll move back the migration to our plans and try it out as soon as we can. Do you have some estimate on the GA of the .NET 5.0 support? Will it be ready until the end of the year? Thank you very much for letting us know that we are now able to migrate!

[aL3891]

We're also in the process of moving to .net core 5, when adding <EnableUnsafeBinaryFormatterSerialization>true</EnableUnsafeBinaryFormatterSerialization> everything seems to work fine, but it's good that formal support is coming.

If we're being fair i think its also worth to point of that @masnider has been saying that exact same thing for years and years and this repo still doesn't even build on windows, updated code is posted months later, if at all, there are hundreds and hundreds of opens issues, with many with no response from the team and transparency on actual progress and what's being worked on is still basically zero.

They keep telling us to have patience, that they're working on making process changes, what their ambitions are and that Microsoft totally isn't winding down service fabric support or development but (in)action speak a lot louder than words. Not to mention that even a basic timeline for these process changes have yet to make an appearance.

Even if azure uses service fabric internally, (though the actual details of that are not ever really elaborated on) it seems pretty clear what priority it has from a "customer" perspective, especially in the regards of the top level app models (reliable services/actors)

[masnider]

@aL3891 we should probably move this to a separate issue but:

though the actual details of that are not ever really elaborated on

What details do you think are missing? Microsoft won't talk about every usage of SF, but some of the outlines that have been shared are pretty detailed, and it's not like there's been changes in how SF is used for eg SQL, CosmosDB, etc.

Some recent examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-0V6bYfTpA&feature=youtu.be&t=3152 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-responds-to-covid19/ (sorry I can't link to a timecode in there but SF is called out within a discussion of the architecture of Teams)

but (in)action speak a lot louder than words. Not to mention that even a basic timeline for these process changes have yet to make an appearance.

Fair. Though hopefully folks are starting to notice improvement in responding to github issues as we ramp up the team there (though there was some backsliding during the holidays), including responding to older issues.

There's clearly much more to do here, including getting better about communicating timelines around the OSS work. So far we have been focused on release dates for the actual product, release notes, and communicating roadmaps, and hopefully folks are noticing improvements there as well.

The improvements to the OSS side are still something I am working through with the PM team to get a plan ackd and funded, so that remains behind where we want, but the other improvements are being delivered, albeit much more slowly than we all would like.

[aL3891]

I'm referring to how service fabric is actually used, not that is used. Your examples are essentially a logo on a slide and that's something of course, but not what I would consider a lot of details. Also, to my knowledge atlas isn't available externally at all. Are they using containers only or are they using the app models? To what extent are they using the stock components of SF and what's custom? What's the reasoning for those choices? How are the apps structured?

My point still stands, Microsofts actions regarding service fabric as a customer product speak a lot louder that words. I think it's fine if Microsoft want to prioritize azure usage specifically for containers, but then communicate that intent. You saying that the oss improvements aren't even "ackd and funded" yet doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in these efforts either especially since its almost to the day three years since open sourcing was announced... (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-service-fabric/service-fabric-is-going-open-source/ba-p/791251)

Bringing things back on topic, March is almost over and SF8 with the promised .net 5 support is no where to be found, no previews, no roadmaps, no tags in github, no blogposts covering high level goals, no reason why it was pushed back from its original November release date. I understand things can get delayed but then tell the community about it and why, don't just quietly update one line in the readme

So while i cant say nothing is being done as far as transparency and communication, i am sorry to say that not enough is being done and not in what i consider a reasonable time frame.

[kgfly]

Service Fabric release schedule -> 8.0 | 2021 Mar

Today is April 12th now. Where to download version 8? Thanks

[juho-hanhimaki]

Service Fabric release schedule -> 8.0 | 2021 Mar

Today is April 12th now. Where to download version 8? Thanks

Take a look at the Service Fabric blog.

[dfedorth]

Looks like SF 8.0 is out now and supports .NET 5 on Windows hosts!

Key Announcements Support for .NET 5 for Windows is now generally available

Source: Service Fabric 8.0 Release Notes