Application Modernization Strategy

On November 10, 2026, Microsoft ends free support and patches for both .NET 8 and .NET 9. A modernization strategy for a .NET and Angular application starts from the support dates of the versions you run.

Microsoft's support policy gives LTS releases three years of free support and patches and STS releases two. .NET 8 (LTS, released November 14, 2023) and .NET 9 (STS, released November 12, 2024) both end support on November 10, 2026. .NET 10 (LTS, released November 11, 2025) is supported until November 14, 2028.

Angular's policy says major releases are typically supported for 24 months: 12 months of active support with regularly scheduled updates and patches, then 12 months of long-term support with only critical fixes and security patches. These dates are as published in November 2026.

Start with the dates above. A .NET 8 or .NET 9 application has until November 10, 2026. A .NET 10 application has until November 14, 2028. For Angular, the version number tells you which support stage it is in.

Angular's guidance for updating across several major versions is to perform each update one major version at a time. Company A's app was five versions behind. Along with a month of bug fixing, I upgraded it to the current version, and the app could then be maintained for under $4K a month.

Company A paid a team of five engineers about $48K a month while the lead engineer rewrote the whole app from scratch, telling the owner that Angular could not scale and the app was too buggy to stabilize. The app was five Angular versions behind, and the team was writing Angular as if it were plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I spent a month fixing bugs and stabilizing the existing app, with no rewrite, and upgraded Angular to the current version. As the app stabilized, the owner let the other engineers go. Engineering cost fell from $48K to $8.7K a month, and ongoing maintenance and new features now cost under $4K a month.