Artifacts Credential Provider v2.0.0 – Upcoming Major Release

[cobya]

🚀 Artifacts Credential Provider v2.0.0 – Upcoming Major Release🚀

We're closing in on the release of the next major release of the Artifacts Credential Provider, v2.0.0! We'll be introducing some significant improvements to the installation tooling and download experience, along with defaulting to our new self-contained binaries for easier installation for users and pipeline agents.

🔧 What’s New In v2.0.0 🔧

• Self-contained by default
  The installation scripts will now default to installing the recently released self-contained binaries, eliminating the need for a pre-installed .NET runtimes on developer and CI machines. This helps support our downstream plugins such as artifacts-keyring and reduces overhead for maintaining pipelines where building .NET projects on a different version than Credential Provider.

If desired, installation parameters can still be used to fetch assets for specific .NET versions such as .NET 6 / .NET 8. See https://github.com/microsoft/artifacts-credprovider?tab=readme-ov-file#environment-variables for more info.

• Versioned install scripts
  Installation scripts will now be released alongside the published GitHub assets, meaning that pinning a given version with legacy installation parameters (such as adding .NET 3.1 from v1.x) will remain consistent even when those parameters are removed in future updates. This allows us to maintain streamlined installation scripts which maintain a minimal set of configuration parameters.

There is no change required from users to adopt the new flow, the existing aka.ms links used to run install scripts will be updated to point to the new scripts which fetch and execute a release version's install script.

• Retirement of .NET Core 3.1 and .NET Framework 4.6.1
  As previously announced in Upcoming end of support for .NET Core 3.1 and .NET Framework 4.6.1 #523, support for .NET Core 3.1 and .NET Framework 4.6.1 has been officially retired. Please upgrade to a .NET version that is still supported or the self-contained binaries. For backwards compatibility if the legacy versions are still required you can pin the final 1.x release version in your install scripts.

📅 Timeline

The v2.0.0 release is scheduled to release in the coming weeks, and an exact date will be provided soon. For most users and installation cases, there will be no action required to update to the new version. If you encounter any issues, please report them to https://github.com/microsoft/artifacts-credprovider/issues for triage.