Add .Net 5.0 support details to our documentation

[marcpopMSFT]

Help us make content visible lifecycle, support, net5

Describe the new article While .NET 5 went out of support in May, the .NET 5.0.2xx and 5.0.4xx SDKs within Visual Studio did not. This was done because .NET Core 3.1 is still in support in Visual Studio 16.9 and 16.11 and targeting 3.1 for development requires a .NET SDK. Rather than try to pull in a different SDK or force customers to install an out of support SDK, we decided to continue supporting the .NET 5 SDK.

To enable this, we made .NET 5.0 optional within VS and configured the .NET 5 SDK to run using the .NET 6 runtime. Because this configuration is specifically for Visual Studio, we are not making the stand-alone version of this SDK available. Customers needing to target 3.1 can use the 3.1.4xx SDK or a newer SDK that are both still in support. This has caused some confusion from customers who weren't sure if the .NET 5 SDK was still in support or not as well as customers looking for the stand-alone download (see https://github.com/dotnet/docs/issues/31088). We need to update our existing documentation to make this policy clear.

5.0.2xx will go out of support when Visual Studio 16.9 does in October 2022 and 5.0.4xx will go out of support after 3.1 is no longer supported in December 2022.

Documentation that needs updating https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/microsoft-net-and-net-core https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/dotnet-core https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/dotnet-core

Existing documentation that mentions this policy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/versioning-sdk-msbuild-vs#lifecycle (see footnote 1) https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-5-end-of-support-update/ (see the last paragraph before Useful Notes)

[marcpopMSFT]

CC @jamshedd @joeloff

[joeloff]

Thank you, this will be really helpful for enterprise customers

[jamshedd]

I agree with the need to add this clarification but don't think we should pollute the official lifecycle page with the details of this exception which will no longer be relevant in a couple of months. So I propose we make this a separate issue or doc page somewhere and link to it from the blog post and other places where we had the 5.0 EOS notifications.

[gewarren]

Can this issue be closed next month (in December)?

[jamshedd]

Yes.

[adegeo]

Should this be closed?

[gewarren]

Closing since the .NET 5.0.2xx and 5.0.4xx SDKs within Visual Studio are now out of support too.