Announcing deprecation of support for .NET Standard 1.6

Wed - 08/26/2020

Following on from our recent announcement of the deprecation of support for Java 7, we are also dropping support for .NET Standard 1.6 in favor of .NET Standard 2.0. This blog details our reasons for doing this, and what it will mean for our .NET userbase.

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.NETAs we discussed recently in our article regarding the deprecation of support for Java 7, in January we asked our users to complete a short survey about which versions of the Java and .NET platforms they use for iText, so we could gauge which versions of these platforms we should target for future iText 7 development. Since we try to pay close attention to the needs of our userbase, we determined that for both the benefit our .NET users, and the future development of iText 7, it was also time to deprecate support for .NET Standard 1.6.

One of the major reasons for us dropping support for .NET Standard 1.6 is that other libraries in the ecosystem are also dropping support for versions earlier than .NET Standard 2.0. This includes some of the dependencies for iText, so our hand is being forced somewhat.

So, as of iText 7.1.13, we will be targeting .NET Standard 2.0 for the future development of the entire iText 7 Suite, instead of .NET Standard 1.6. This will mean that when developing iText we will have access to many more APIs and thus provide our users with more robust and flexible code.

iText 7 Suite .NET support plan

As you can see in the following table, we will however be preserving support for .NET Framework 4.0, until January next year at least. Although, considering Microsoft themselves announced they were ending support in January 2016, we think we’ve done pretty well!

Version

Original Release Date

Latest Patch Version

Patch Release Date

Support Level

End of Support

iText End of Support

.NET Core 3.1

December 3, 2019

3.1.5

June 9, 2020

LTS

December 3, 2022

December 2023

.NET Core 3.0

September 23, 2019

3.0.3

February 18, 2020

EOL

March 3, 2020

 

.NET Core 2.2

December 4, 2018

2.2.8

November 19, 2019

EOL

December 23, 2019

 

.NET Core 2.1

May 30, 2018

2.1.19

June 9, 2020

LTS

August 21, 2021

August 2022

.NET Core 2.0

August 14, 2017

2.0.9

July 10, 2018

EOL

October 1, 2018

 

.NET Core 1.1

November 16, 2016

1.1.13

May 14, 2019

EOL

June 27, 2019

 

.NET Core 1.0

June 27, 2016

1.0.16

May 14, 2019

EOL

June 27, 2019

 

.NET Framework 4

April 12, 2010      

January 12, 2016

January 2021

.NET Framework 4.5

August 15, 2012      

January 12, 2016

 

Benefits of .NET Standard 2.0

As noted by Microsoft when detailing what was new in version 2.0, .NET Standard version 1.6 only included a comparatively small subset of APIs, excluding many APIs commonly used in the .NET Framework or Xamarin. This meant that developers had to find suitable replacements for familiar APIs when developing applications targeting multiple .NET implementations, significantly complicating development. To address these issues, .NET Standard 2.0 added more than 20,000 new APIs that can be used.

If you want to see a clear breakdown of the various .NET implementations supported in each version of the .NET Standard specification, an interactive table is available which lists all supported implementations and the number of available APIs for each version.

On top of that, Microsoft also listed some of the additions to the System namespace:

  • Support for the AppDomain
  • Better support for working with arrays from additional members in the Array
  • Better support for working with attributes from additional members in the Attribute
  • Better calendar support and additional formatting options for DateTime
  • Additional Decimal rounding functionality.
  • Additional functionality in the Environment
  • Enhanced control over the garbage collector through the GC
  • Enhanced support for string comparison, enumeration, and normalization in the String
  • Support for daylight saving adjustments and transition times in the AdjustmentRule and TimeZoneInfo.TransitionTime classes.
  • Significantly enhanced functionality in the Type
  • Better support for deserialization of exception objects by adding an exception constructor with SerializationInfo and StreamingContext

In closing, we believe that by switching to target .NET Standard 2.0 strikes the right balance between supporting users who need to run on legacy systems while offering the best environment for .NET developers, since .NET Standard 2.0 is supported by all modern platforms and is the recommended way to support multiple platforms with one target.



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