I’d like to announce that the time has come for us to deprecate support for MSBuild 14 & 15 when analysing .NET projects. These were shipped with Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 and no longer have mainstream support from Microsoft. We plan to drop support for these versions starting in 2024, so we suggest migrating your build pipelines to use newer MSBuild versions this year.
Supporting these older versions makes it hard for us to leverage the new features in Roslyn that allow us to improve our analysis. There are some rules that are computed in different ways depending on the version of MSBuild you are using - where this is the case we will no longer make improvements to these rules on the deprecated MSBuild versions.
With these changes, you can still analyze your projects targetting older versions of .NET Framework or .NET Core, while using a newer version of MSBuild.
This is a follow-up to announce we have started the work to drop MSbuild 14 and deprecate MSBuild 15 in our tools. As mentioned before, this version is not supported by Microsoft and it is time to retire it from our support as well.
The next version of the scanner, to be published end of February, will emit a warning message indicating that we do not support MSBuild 14 and that MSBuild 15 is deprecated. You can assume that any version after that might stop working when using MSBuild 14.
Our documentation for the scanner will reflect this, and give information on how to use MSBuild 16 to build your projects correctly.
Mainstream support for MSBuild 15 ended in 2022, which is why support is deprecated. Please note that “deprecated” does not mean that it is not supported anymore. It still works, and we still support it. That being said, given that it is not in mainstream support yet, users should make plans on moving to a version that is being supported (by Microsoft and by us) anyway.