Today I learned that .NET 8 Preview could play better with Homebrew (or vice-versa). I’m working on a C# 12 presentation for our local developer meetup, and for that, I wanted .NET 8 Preview to run side by side with version 7 on my Mac. As version 7 was initially installed with Homebrew, I also wanted to install version 8 Preview with Homebrew, but that recipe was unavailable. Not perfectly happy with that, I fell back to the stand-alone installer, expecting problems.
Installation went well, but then I turned to the command line only to find that dotnet --list-sdks was still and only
showing version 7. Yet, the 8 Preview was sitting there at its canonical location at /usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk,
where the v7 was also listed.
Puzzled, I tried a few things, but the quick fix was to simply brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies dotnet and, boom,
both versions 8 Preview and 7 became immediately available. I suspect that brew uninstall only removed the symlink
from .NET canonical location to the Homebrew cellar, which magically solved the SDK visibility problem.
TL; DR. Homebrew recipes don’t play nicely with .NET canonical installer. To make all my SDK versions visible to .NET, I had to forego the Homebrew installation, which did not uninstall the SDK itself, but simply unlinked it.