.NET 10 installed by Homebrew is not recognized on the MacBook

[kangyue1997]

This is a resolved issue used to monitor and see who else has this problem to tackle in the future. I am using MacBook ARM64, and used Homebrew to install .NET 10 which is placed at /opt/homebrew/Cellar/dotnet/. However, Storage Explorer expects .NET to be installed at /usr/local/share/dotnet, which is where the official Microsoft installer puts it. Therefore, I encountered the error:

The authentication library used by Storage Explorer has failed to start properly. Please ensure you have .NET 10 installed. If .NET 10 is already installed then refer to the troubleshooting guide for help. Verbose authentication logging has been enabled.

To resolve this, please install the .NET 10 runtime from the official Microsoft download page again: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download.

[craxal]

Thanks for documenting this. You're right — Storage Explorer looks for .NET in the standard Microsoft install path (/usr/local/share/dotnet on Intel Macs, /usr/local/share/dotnet or the arm64 equivalent on Apple Silicon). Homebrew installs to /opt/homebrew/Cellar/dotnet/, which isn't in our search path.

Workaround: Install the .NET 10 runtime from the official Microsoft download page. You can keep the Homebrew version for other purposes.

We'll track this as a documentation improvement to make the troubleshooting guide clearer about this scenario. Closing as the workaround resolves it.

[craxal]

Reopening — we should investigate detecting .NET installed via Homebrew rather than requiring users to install it a second time from the official source. Homebrew is widely used on macOS.

[craxal]

Root Cause Analysis

Root cause: _configureEnvVars() in IdentityUserAccountsManager.ts did not set DOTNET_ROOT before launching the ServiceHub controller. On macOS ARM64, Homebrew installs .NET to /opt/homebrew/share/dotnet, which is not in the default .NET host resolution search path. Additionally, Electron apps launched from Dock/Finder don't inherit the user's shell PATH, so the dotnet symlink in /opt/homebrew/bin/ is also not found.

Fix: Added a DotnetResolver utility that probes for the .NET installation using env vars, /etc/dotnet/install_location, well-known paths (including Homebrew's), and which dotnet as a fallback. The resolved path is set as DOTNET_ROOT on process.env before ServiceHub launch, so the controller child process inherits it.

PR: https://devdiv.visualstudio.com/DevDiv/_git/StorageExplorer/pullrequest/722496