Announcing the Upcoming Deprecation of MSAL.NET for Xamarin and UWP
Hello, developers!
We have some important news to share with you regarding MSAL.NET—our .NET authentication library for Microsoft Entra. As you may know, technology evolves fast, and we want to keep up with the latest best practices and development patterns.
That is why we are announcing the deprecation of the Xamarin and UWP versions of MSAL.NET starting with MSAL.NET 4.61.0.
What does this mean?
Starting with MSAL.NET 4.61.0, the library will no longer include Xamarin (see Xamarin support policy) and UWP binaries. If you have pinned your applications to a specific version of MSAL.NET, the change will not affect you, as existing releases are not impacted.
The removal of legacy binaries will not result in a major version bump as we do not consider it a breaking change for the broader ecosystem. There is no impact on other .NET versions within the library.
We recommend you migrate your Xamarin and UWP applications to modern frameworks such as MAUI and WinUI 3. The .NET Upgrade Assistant can help you migrate your Xamarin applications to .NET MAUI or UWP applications to WinUI 3.
What should I do next?
We strongly recommend that you migrate your applications to any of the supported .NET platform releases, such as .NET 8 or .NET Framework 4.8, which offer better performance, security, and compatibility.
To learn more about all the features and capabilities of the latest MSAL.NET releases, refer to our documentation.
For details about the .NET platform support policy, refer to the official documentation for .NET and .NET Core.
We understand that this may cause some inconvenience for our community but we believe that this is the best decision for the future of MSAL.NET and the developer ecosystem around it.
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5 comments
We recommend you migrate your Xamarin and UWP applications to modern frameworks such as .NET MAUI or WinUI 3. 🙂
The .NET Upgrade Assistant can help migrate Xamarin to .NET MAUI or UWP to WinUI 3, so it seems appropriate to mention both.
Thank you Alvin! I’ve updated the post to include these details.
Just to be crystal clear, you’re dropping uwp support in newer versions of MSAL but current and older versions will continue to work for uwp apps. Is that correct?
Correct. Now, that comes with its own set of constraints – older versions of MSAL.NET won’t get new features backported. But you could pin an existing version and have it continue working.