Is .NET Core 3 (and .NET 5 to .NET 7) compatible with Windows 7?

Question

I've been doing a lot of reading of Microsoft blog posts relating to .NET Core 3, but none of them mention the Windows version requirements, which is leading to a lot of comments querying whether Windows 7 will be supported?

I did find a quote from Rich Lander in this theregister.co.uk article:

Lander says "Windows 7 is supported with .NET Core 2. We haven’t locked the OS matrix for .NET Core 3, but we don’t have any specific plans on changing it."

Is there a definitive statement on Windows 7 support .NET Core 3 from Microsoft anywhere?

PS: I appreciate that Windows 7 is End of Life, but I'm also mindful that XP's extended support period was lengthened. Judging by the number of our clients who are still running Windows 7 it seems possible that Win 7 might get an extension too.

Chaparajos

Answer 1

Just came across this table in the dotnet core GitHub repo which suggests that Windows 7 is indeed supported for .NET Core 3.0:

Windows 7 is also still supported in NET Core 3.1

And in .NET 5

And in .NET 6

But not in .NET 7 onwards

Chaparajos

Just wanted to add that I needed to change the build settings from Any CPU to x86 for my .NET Core 3.1 app to work on a Win7 SP1 x86 system. – Josephina

Windows 7 support has been removed: github.com/dotnet/core/issues/7556#issuecomment-1317835826 – Penna

Answer 2

You can also run .NET Core on Windows 7 SP0 if you install KB2533623 (~1MB).

Tested it on .NET 5.0 self-contained WPF application. Works fine.

Whoremaster

Answer 3

It is even better. According to dotnet core repo the upcoming unifying .NET 5 will support Windows 7 SP1 and 8.

Ejector

Answer 4

.NET 7 doesn't support Windows 7 anymore. https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/7.0/supported-os.md

Removing Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 from support matrix. They were copied over from .NET 6 by accident and just noticed now.

https://github.com/dotnet/core/pull/7970

Penna

Thank you for posting this. I've updated my answer to reflect that. – Chaparajos

Answer 5

Compatible and Supported are two very different things. The OS, Win7, itself is not supported so all of these answers involving support are not relevant.

If you can get Win7 to run, then you can also get .NET8 projects to run on Win7. Just because it isn't supported doesn't mean it doesn't work.

The details have to do with what libraries you end up calling. It is not .NET8 itself that is incompatible with Win7 but some libraries and commands may call upon things that don't exist on Windows 7. So it is as compatible as the software developed.

If you are developing software to run on Win7, you can make it work by using only the libraries and commands that exist.

Related discussion and the fall of support: https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/7556

Mirandamire