NuGet Enhancements
Enhanced Stability
Unfortunately, we experienced a few temporary NuGet outages earlier this year. We apologize for any inconvenience in this regard. The good news is that we’ve rebuilt our internal nuget.devexpress.com infrastructure and load balancers from scratch, rewrote critical .NET code, improved telemetry and migrated to Amazon for storage. We believe that all underlying issues have been addressed (at least our monitoring has not detected serious issues in the last 6 months), but are now looking for your feedback.
If you happen to encounter issues with nuget.devexpress.com, please feel free to email me personally at dennis@devexpress.com, and I will be happy to look into it for you with our web site team.
Authentication with Personal Access Tokens
We now support NuGet authentication via a token or an authorization key - especially helpful for GitHub Dependabot, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps. If you use an authorization key, use https://nuget.devexpress.com/api as the package source. Here is an example with login and password authentication: nuget sources add -name DevExpress -source https://nuget.devexpress.com/api -username DevExpress -password {TOKEN}
For more information, please review the following help topics: NuGet CLI | .Net CLI | Azure DevOps | NuGet Package Manager.
Plans for NuGet Hot-Fixes
In addition to Portable PDB, our Installation & NuGet survey in April helped us validate a few more hypotheses, among them the need for NuGet hot-fixes. While we cannot make promises today, we expect to offer NuGet hot-fixes by the end of 2021 or in early 2022.
We intent to publish hot-fixes through
nuget.devexpress.com 4-5 times per month (along with our intermediate builds via installers). This should save time and assist those awaiting hot-fixes within their CI/CD pipelines. Needless to say, it will be much faster to edit a package version (two bytes) in *.props files than to download and run our Unified Component Installer.
EDIT: Available since December 2021.
Installer Enhancements
Our Redundant .NET Core Desktop Product Installer Will Be Removed in v21.2
As you may already know, the DevExpress Unified Component Installer with .NET Core support for WinForms and WPF (learn more) ended our need to ship a separate/standalone .NET Core Desktop Product Installer. With our v21.2 release, this standalone .NET Core Desktop Product Installer will be removed from our distribution and no longer available via the DevExpress Download Manager and Download Trial pages.
If you need to install our products for .NET Core, please use our Unified Component Installer instead. It includes everything needed for the .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core and JavaScript development. Our Unified Component Installer also offers a more intuitive installation experience and improved design-time experience for .NET Core Desktop users (includes our Template Gallery, DevExpress Menu, etc).
Portable PDB Support for Windows and Linux Debugging
.NET Core introduced a new symbol file (PDB) format - portable PDBs. Unlike traditional PDBs (for Windows), portable PDBs can be created and read across all supported platforms. Based on user feedback in our recent survey, we have added Portable PDB Symbols to our v21.2 distribution (official release in November).
Improved Installer Experience for Blazor, Reporting, and .NET App Security API
With v21.2, our Unified Component Installer will offer a few more options to help you navigate our expanding product line.
- Reporting. As you may already know, our individual platform subscriptions (WinForms, WPF, Blazor/ASP.NET) include a license to DevExpress Reports. Our installer’s new UI better reflects this fact. As an owner of a platform subscription, you can now save a bit of hard disk space and opt to install only the products appropriate for your UI platform. You can also install trial versions of non-licensed platforms/products.
- Office File API. Additionally, our platform subscriptions include the DevExpress Office File API (Basic Edition). The Basic Edition of our Office File API supports standard Word document processing, PDF export and printing capabilities (refer to our website for more information in this regard). Note: the Office File API (Complete Edition) includes advanced functionality such as Spreadsheet document processing, APIs for Barcode, ZIP and Digital Signature generation, and much more. If you would like to leverage these advanced features, you must purchase a license to the Office File API or our Universal Subscription. If you require assistance in this regard, please email clientservices@devexpress.com.
- .NET App Security API. Finally, we encourage you to check out the capabilities of our .NET Role-based Access Control & User Authentication API powered by Entity Framework (EF Core) and DevExpress eXpress Persistent Objects ORM (XPO). To register your free copy, simply visit https://www.devexpress.com/security-api-free. For more information on what is included, customer tesitominals and frequently asked questions, please refer to our official announcement.
Free DevExpress Products - Get Your Copy Today
The following free DevExpress product offers remain available. Should you have any questions about the free offers below, please submit a ticket via the
DevExpress Support Center at your convenience. We'll be happy to follow-up.