Diogenes: Winforms Designer won't open in VS2022 because the project targets .net 5

[Mattwmaster58]

Is there any reason to stick with .net 5? I cannot open the designer files in VS2022 and it advises me to upgrade .net to be able to use the designer.

In the v2 branch, I switched from net5.0-windows to net8.0 in Diogenes.csproj - everything appears to work out of the box

[jglim]

It's likely that some workshops and home garages depend on a beater laptop and those are often stuck on older versions of Windows. I left the project on .net 5 as (i think) subsequent versions drop support for Windows 7 and VS2019.

This project also does not yet depend on any critical new features from later .net versions, so it should hopefully be okay for a while. Microsoft intentionally makes these matters a bit harder for us as it is in their business interest to do so.

When development eventually becomes too difficult, I think it'll be reasonable to bump it up to net8.0

[Mattwmaster58]

This is fair .NET 6 was the last supported for windows 7.

There's a workaround I use just so I don't have to maintain a separate VS instance, and that's to change it anyway in the csproj so I can use the designed, then change it back to 5 to make sure it works.