Recently we sent out an email blast to all the customers of our .NET components asking a simple question: are you in agreement that we should concentrate our future development for .NET 2.0 or later? The email followed on from this post I'd made and was intended to get some responses that may have been more frank than public comments to a blog post. I would like to take this opportunity to reveal the results of that informal survey.
It will probably come as no surprise to you that the majority of respondents (85%) unequivocally agreed with this strategy.
Having said that, I don't mean to imply that the remaining 15% of respondents were dead against it and were ready to storm DevExpress Towers with pitchforks and burning torches. By no means, thankfully. Unfortunately, I don't think we were clear enough in the email (and possibly neither with the blog post as well), and a large number of the 15% were just worried that we were going to abandon them to the legacy code sharks, even though they were planning to move to .NET 2.0 in the next year anyway. So let me be unambiguous, and in bold to boot:
Developer Express will continue to support and maintain its components, frameworks and tools that target .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1.
So we will be providing bug fixes and minor enhancements for the foreseeable future for version 2006.3 of DXperience. By that I mean all our products that were revised for that version, and also the upcoming version 2.1 of our IDE productivity tools, CodeRush and Refactor! Pro. If you are using some component or tool from these latest versions with .NET 1.x, rest assured that you'll continue to get support, bug fixes and workarounds for them as long as it makes sense.
Version 2007.1 of DXperience will be our first release that targets just .NET 2.0 or later. All our new development, new components, major enhancements, and new functionality from this point on will be for version 2.0 of the .NET framework, and indeed some of our current products are already .NET 2.0 only. The story with regard to CodeRush and Refactor! Pro is a little more fuzzy mainly because of DXCore (it's shared between all versions of Visual Studio you have on your machine), but be warned that the next major version will most likely just be for Visual Studio 2005 or later.
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