Please provide patch-agnostic URLs for runtime downloads

When you distribute a framework-dependent app, it’s necessary to give the users a URL to download the runtime if they don’t have it already. The best link for this currently appears to be https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/5.0/runtime, but it confronts users with several choices, only one of which is right. Along with this URL, I have to say “make sure you click the x64 button under the desktop apps section.” This is clumsy to have to explain, and for some kinds of users, error-prone.

So why not give the end users a link to the direct download of the correct runtime, e.g. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/thank-you/runtime-desktop-5.0.7-windows-x64-installer? The problem is that this pins a specific patch version of the runtime. I don’t want that because they will be installing a version that is missing security updates. Also, thank-you in the URL feels vaguely undesirable but I can’t put my finger on why. Ideally the URL could also be short.

Proposal

A URL that seems ideal to me would be something like https://dot.net/download/runtime/desktop/x64/5.0. It would provide the latest 5.0.x x64 desktop runtime. If the version part was 5 instead of 5.0, it would provide the latest 5.x.x x64 desktop runtime. Maybe it would be nice if it showed a landing page and also immediately started a download. Maybe for the ease of building web installers, an additional /direct URL part could cause a direct download. But the experience needs to be nice for non-technical folks who don’t know the terms x64 vs Arm64 or console vs desktop.

[akoeplinger]

This was actually already implemented by https://github.com/dotnet/arcade/issues/5757

E.g. to get the latest 5.0 released build you can use:

• https://aka.ms/dotnet/5.0/dotnet-runtime-win-x64.exe (runtime)
• https://aka.ms/dotnet/5.0/windowsdesktop-runtime-win-x64.exe (Windows Desktop runtime)
• https://aka.ms/dotnet/5.0/dotnet-sdk-win-x64.exe (SDK)

It also works for 6.0 preview builds which you can get with:

• https://aka.ms/dotnet/6.0/preview/dotnet-runtime-win-x64.exe (runtime)
• https://aka.ms/dotnet/6.0/preview/windowsdesktop-runtime-win-x64.exe (Windows Desktop runtime)
• https://aka.ms/dotnet/6.0/preview/dotnet-sdk-win-x64.exe (SDK)

[richlander]

We are looking at doing something like this via the dotnet.ms.com site that is focused on latest releases (preview or stable). We will share a short spec when we have it.

@mairaw