.NET 7 — Release Plans & Collaboration with Microsoft

In early November, Microsoft released .NET 7 — the latest iteration of the .NET initiative. During internal testing, we stumbled upon an issue that was later confirmed by our customers. In this post, I'll detail the issue, describe our joint efforts with Microsoft to address the issue, and our future plans regarding .NET 7.

What Happened

Customers who migrated to .NET 7 noticed that invoking control designers caused exceptions and led to Visual Studio crash events.

Prior to customer reports, we identified the underlying cause: changes introduced in pull request #6108. This seemingly minor refactoring task caused type mismatch errors in WinForms designer code that relies on the SaveTabSelection method from the PropertyGrid class.

Resolving the Issue

When we confirmed the cause of the problem, we filed a public pull request #8055 in the .NET repository. You can read the PR summary for more information on the issue and the proposed fix.

Microsoft's .NET team reacted quickly. After implementing additional suggestions to rule out similar issues in the future, the pull request was approved and merged.

What's Next

As of the date of this post, Microsoft’s Download .NET 7 page still offers v7.0.0 (released on November 8, 2022). We do not know when the next version (with the aforementioned fix) will become available. But when it does, designer crash events should be a thing of the past.

As for DevExpress products, we expect v22.1+ and newer builds to be .NET 7 compatible. Please note that v22.2 will be the first version certified for .NET 7 (scheduled for release in December).

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