Kentico V8: The future of Visual Studio and .NET versions in Kentico

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There are just few weeks to go before we release Kentico V8. For us, it’s time to make our final decisions about the features we want in V8 and the software (Visual studio, browsers, etc.) we want to support. We recently decided that Kentico V8 will not support Visual studio (VS) 2010.

Why we decided to stop support of VS 2010?

There are three main reasons:
  • Discussions held at Kentico Connection 2013 (mainly in Sydney) with some of our partners about usage of VS 2010 indicated that it is no longer used for website development with Kentico.
  • Kentico Azure support – Kentico V8 will support Windows Azure SDK 2.2. However, this SDK version is not compatible with VS 2010.
  • Kentico MVC support – if MVC isn’t installed in your VS 2010, then you won’t be able to open a Kentico V8 project, because there is a new project for MVC application; MVC project type. This project type is not recognized by the default installation of VS 2010.

How will we handle this going forward?

We have decided that all future versions of Kentico will support the latest released version of VS (at the time of the Kentico version release) and one VS version back.  

What about .NET versions?

Kentico installer will offer two .NET framework versions:
  • .NET Framework 4.0 – can be opened in VS 2012
  • .NET Framework 4.5(.1) – can be opened in VS 2013
.NET Framework 4.5 and 4.5.1 share the same Common Language Runtime (CLR), so they use the same Kentico DLLs. That is why these two versions are under the same option. But, by default, the project will be compiled for .NET 4.5. If you want to use .NET framework 4.5.1, you must change the target Framework option in VS to this.

Do you have any feedback?  

Although the release of Kentico V8 is really close, there is still some time to make changes. So, should you see any problems with the above decisions, please let me know. Any feedback from your side is always appreciated!
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Dominik Pinter

I'm a fan of cloud computing (primarily Windows Azure) and I really like to dig into web application security. My blog is focused on everything related to Kentico, .NET Framework, Cloud platforms and web application security.

Comments

Armysniper89 commented on

Brian, I hear you. But I would say that it is a very easy transition to move from Visual Studio 2010 to 2012 or 13. We have our projects moving that way now and only had a few small thing that had to be adjusted. Besides, Visual Studio 2010 was so crash prone and slow...as a former member of the MS Visual Studio team, it is the last vestiges of a very old code architecture. So I would make the jump to the much higher performing, and more open oriented VS 2012/13.

Brian commented on

That's disappointing. We have several Kentico projects that are developed using Visual Studio 2010.