Beware of Ending Support
The upcoming version of Kentico will not include two features that previously were part of the product and the Visual Studio free edition support. I will describe the reasons for this course of action in this article.
Friends and Messaging
The first drop-offs are Friends and Messaging modules. We conducted research among our customers and figured out that these modules have little to no usage these days, compared to the past. Given the fact that most customers tend to rely on best-of-breed tools for internal and external communication, we decided to discontinue these modules and instead focus on more essential modules. Kentico solution will get a bit slimmer, and our development team will save the time they spent on maintenance and release-testing of those modules to work on modules that are important for the end users and our partners.
Visual Studio Free Edition
Microsoft no longer supports the free edition of Visual Studio for Visual Studio version 2017 and higher. We want to keep the C# language up to date with every Kentico release. The latest C# version requires the Visual Studio 2017. That being said, the upcoming version of Kentico solution will no longer support the free edition of Visual Studio as a consequence of the information above. You and your clients can use the community editions if you meet the legal criteria set by Microsoft.
Do you see any issues with the forthcoming changes or are they utterly irrelevant to your business? Please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.