HeroDevs Throws .NET 6 Users a Post-Deprecation Lifeline
HeroDevs, a company that provides support and compliance for deprecated open source software, recently announced support for developers working with .NET 6, to complement its existing support for AngularJS, Spring, Vue 2 and other projects.
Microsoft deprecated .NET 6 last month and HeroDevs announced its Never-Ending Support (NES) for .NET version 6 offering. .NET 6 is an older version of Microsoft’s open source software framework that is extensively used in applications around the world.
With NES, HeroDevs will provide customers with a maintained version of .NET 6, including regular updates that fix security issues and other vulnerabilities. The HeroDevs team has also committed to providing secure versions of all future deprecated versions of .NET, Aaron Frost, the CEO of HeroDevs, told The New Stack.
Millions of Users?
Microsoft and the .NET Foundation terminated long-term support for .NET 6 on Nov. 12, 2024, leaving developers and companies who haven’t migrated in a state of risk and non-compliance. Yet, despite terminating support, this version of the framework is still one of the most used and remains integral to countless systems due to its stability, robust features, and compatibility with critical business applications.
“We estimate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of companies are using unsupported versions of .NET in their application development,” Bill Ahmed, director at Palo Alto Strategy Group. “With .NET NES, HeroDevs will be able to help these organizations maintain security on those unsupported versions without the need for an upgrade.”
HeroDevs has stepped in to provide a solution that ensures businesses can continue using .NET 6 securely and confidently.
“The lifecycle of critical technologies, like .NET 6, doesn’t always align with the needs of a business and forced migration can lead to errors, interrupt major projects, dramatically increase costs, and slow innovation,” Frost said in a statement. “By our estimates and feedback from customers, migrating to a new version of .NET can cost an organization millions of dollars and thousands of hours…”
From Dev-for-Hire Beginnings to Fortune 500 Customers
Frost founded HeroDevs in 2018 as a dev-for-hire consulting company, then pivoted the next year to provide extended support for Angular 1 after Google announced its end-of-life.
“We worked closely with the Angular team at Google. And in 2019, Google announced they were going to kill Angular One, which was frustrating for me because I dedicated a lot of my career to it,” Frost told The New Stack. “So, we said let’s keep Angular supported after the end of life for a limited number of customers who might need us to help them upgrade. And it turns out that the second we started, the phone started ringing.”
Callers included Capitol One, Amazon and NASA. The company has about 1,000 Fortune 500 and government customers globally, Frost said.
Support for Hundreds of Open Source Packages
In 2022, HeroDevs saw that Vue 2 was experiencing an end of life. “So, we went to the Vue community and Evan You [creator of Vue] and we pitched a partnership to him,” to provide extended support for the platform, Frost said. The company also began to provide support for Spring 5, which reached its end of OSS support on Aug. 31, 2024.
“This year we expanded to now include hundreds of pieces of open source software that are depended on by all of our customers,” Frost said. HeroDevs provides extended support for AngularJS, Spring, Drupal, jQuery, Bootstrap, Vue 2, Node.js and dozens of other open source technologies.
“Our goal is to provide neverending support for every major package that’s housed on GitHub.com today,” he said. “Our goal is to provide the exact same support that the open source team did during LTS [Long-term Support].”
Enter .NET
Moreover, “With .NET being very complimentary to Spring, our other customers — the ones who don’t need Spring — the biggest ask that they had was for us to provide .NET support. That’s when we brought in [Hayden] Barnes,” he said.
Hayden Barnes, a senior software engineer focusing on .NET at HeroDevs, told The New Stack, “My background is in Windows and Linux cross-platform. I led WSL [Windows Subsystem for Linux] efforts at Ubuntu in partnership with Microsoft. Later, I worked with Rancher on Windows container support within Rancher. So, from running Linux on Windows to running Windows on Linux, I spent some time in the AI/ML space. I have been a Microsoft MVP for five years now, in the Windows dev space.”
Barnes said he has been working in the .NET space for years and beyond that he’s been working in and around the overall open source Microsoft focus with the teams building and leading open source efforts at Microsoft.
Once a framework like .NET 6 reaches the end of its life, it no longer receives updates, including security patches. This exposes organizations to several risks, including security vulnerabilities, legal non-compliance and operational risks. However, HeroDevs’ NES eliminates these risks by delivering security patches, compatibility updates, and ongoing maintenance, the company said.
NES Benefits
Moreover, HeroDevs NES for .NET 6 ensures companies — especially those in highly-regulated industries like healthcare, government, and finance — remain compliant with their industry and internal requirements. Once a customer has been onboarded, the drop-in replacement can be installed in just a few minutes. Key benefits include:
- Continuous Security Fixes: Vulnerabilities and security issues are promptly fixed to protect customers’ applications. HeroDevs also continually audits the .NET codebase to identify potential issues and fix them before they become known issues.
- Compatibility Assurance: Regular compatibility updates keep customers’ applications functioning seamlessly within their existing environments.
- SLA and Data Security Compliance: HeroDevs NES for .NET 6 ensures service level agreement (SLA) and security compliance frameworks like FedRAMP, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, FERPA, and ISO 27001. This support is crucial for organizations in highly regulated industries like government, finance, and healthcare, where compliance and data security are non-negotiable.
- Expert Support: .NET NES is developed and maintained by .NET experts, including core team members from the open source project — guaranteeing the same high standard of quality developers demand.
“HeroDevs is a lifeline for companies who struggle to keep their open source stack up to date and secure,” Ahmed told The New Stack. “By providing continually patched, drop-in replacements for end-of-life open source libraries to its customers, HeroDevs ensures legacy software is secure and meets today’s rigorous compliance standards.”
Ecosystem Like Java
Meanwhile, Barnes noted that “.NET is an interesting ecosystem. In contrast with Java, which, while led by Oracle, certainly has multivendor support and multivendor contributions, upstream .NET is still largely dominated by Microsoft in terms of the development. And you see, for example, UI frameworks like Uno and Avalonia in the ecosystem, and Microsoft welcoming those.”
Therefore, HeroDevs’ support could help open up the .NET ecosystem.
“I think this is going to be a big step for .NET as an open source platform and product and is going to kind of change the narrative around .NET as being a Microsoft-only option, and open it up with multivendor support and the offerings that HeroDevs provide,” he said.
“Microsoft gets huge kudos for open sourcing .NET,” Barnes added.
Giving Back to the Community
In addition to its NES offerings, HeroDevs provides financial support to open source projects and maintainers. In 2024, the company donated millions of dollars to fund the future development of the projects it supports and is committed to increasing that number in 2025, Frost said.
“In 2024 we’ve donated over 10% of our top line proceeds back to the open source authors that originally built these packages and are helping us with our support,” Frost said. “We’ve given over two and a half million dollars back to the community, just in 2024 alone…”
