Today we are announcing an important change in the work of products for creating Stimulsoft reports and dashboards. Starting with the next version, 2022.3, we will stop supporting .NET Standard 2.0 for all our Web components. Thus, .NET Standard 2.1 version is becoming the minimum supported standard version.
What’s new in .NET Standard 2.1
.NET Standard is a formal specification of .NET APIs that are available on multiple .NET implementations. .NET Standard 2.0 was released on 14 August 2017, and .NET Standard 2.1 was released in November 2018. We continued to support both standards before and including version 2022.2.6. Microsoft stopped the support of .NET Standard 2.0 on 23 December 2019 and fully focused on the new Standard version.Basic new features of .NET Standard 2.1:
- The support of the Span. It allows you to work with arrays and strings. It fundamentally lays in new features, affecting program performance in .NET Standard 2.1;
- About three thousand new APIs which weren’t in .NET Standard 2.0 have been added;
- Foundational API – affects performance and increases the list of the program interfaces;
- Reflection.Emit – adds technology of fast generation types, helps optimize the performance;
- Previously used API SIMD is added now to the NuGet package;
- Updated ValueTask increases the performance;
- DbProviderFactories simplifies the use of ADO.NET – a technology that allows you to work with data quickly.
.NET Standard 2.1 and Stimulsoft products
The use of version 2.0 held back the development of the company's products to a certain extent because we need to compile the Stimulsoft libraries for projects that use .NET Standard 2.0. Starting with the next version 2022.3, our products will stop working in projects and applications, that use outdated versions of .NET Core - 2.0, 2.1, 2.2.New .NET Standard 2.1 is backward compatible with the previous version and supports the latest releases .NET Core 3.0 and higher, including the last version of .NET – 6.0. All of this will significantly improve the functionality of our products, will make the work with data more effective and quick, and won’t disrupt the work of existing applications.
If you have any questions, please contact us.