DXperience 13.1 will be .NET 4 or above

For quite some time now, we’ve had a somewhat weird split in the platforms we support. For WPF and Silverlight, we moved to a common set of underlying libraries way back in version 10.1, two years ago. As part of this restructuring we decided to take advantage of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. Overall, this change has been positive, and the implementation of our set of Windows 8 XAML controls in 12.2 (which require Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5) was made much easier (and quicker) by this decision.

However, our WinForms and WebForms controls have not kept up. For these platforms, we are still supporting .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 or later. This has started to cause some issues with the cross-platform libraries we implement: we’d like to take advantage of newer C# 4 and .NET 4 features for our XAML code (and, indeed, for our WinForms and ASP.NET code), but we’re being held back. One of the biggest features we can’t take advantage of, as an example, is the new dynamic keyword, which is almost de rigueur when writing web code these days.

The other issue is that, we currently support three IDE versions, with all the required extra testing that entails (not to mention that the UI designer in VS 2010 was a big change in and of itself). We also took a look at the statistics we have about which IDEs you, our customers, are using and I’d have to say the vast majority (95%+) are using VS 2010 or VS2012. It seems in the Visual Studio ecosystem, developers tend to stay up to date. Heck, even I’m using VS2012, uppercase menus or not…

Consequently, after some debate, we decided to standardize and make .NET 4 (or later) and Visual Studio 2010 (or later) firm requirements for version 13.1 of DXperience.

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