The C# extension targets .NET 5 which goes out of support in May 2022

[pkanavos]

The C# extension targets a "Current" release, .NET 5, that goes out of support in just 8 months, limiting the usefulness of the current release.

Other adoption issues:

• The extension doesn't work on Linux, which means
• It's impossible to use this extension on official Docker images since the Windows images were withdrawn
• There's still no documentation available that would allow the community to create .NET Core language extensions for C# and (more importantly for data analysis) F#

The Linux/Docker limits even experimentation with this extension.

Besides, the top-level statements and global usings in C# 10/.NET 6 are far more suitable for this kind of scripting

[Aniruddh25]

Thank you for your suggestions!

You can get the same extension working against .NET 6 by simply modifying the language-extensions/dotnet-core-CSharp/src/managed/Microsoft.SqlServer.CSharpExtension.csproj file to include the RollForward Property with value LatestMajor, building it and recreating the language.

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputPath>$(BinRoot)/$(Configuration)/</OutputPath>
    <AppendTargetFrameworkToOutputPath>false</AppendTargetFrameworkToOutputPath>
    **<RollForward>LatestMajor</RollForward>**
  </PropertyGroup>

• Work is TO DO for Linux support. It will be similar to existing extensions for R/Python/Java. We encourage our enthusiastic developer community if they'd like to add support for Linux to feel free to send PRs to this repository :)
• Totally understand the docker image concern.
• Here is SQL Server Language Extensions overview : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/language-extensions/language-extensions-overview?view=sql-server-ver15 And how you to write your own language extension e.g. for F# : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/language-extensions/reference/extensibility-framework-api?view=sql-server-ver15 Please let us know how we can help further in the documentation.

[Aniruddh25]

The latest release of C# language extension targets .NET 6: https://github.com/microsoft/sql-server-language-extensions/releases/tag/dotnet-CSharp-v1.1.0

Closing this issue since its not applicable anymore.