The big release a while back was .NET 5.0 and it seems that Microsoft and the community are releasing .NET on a yearly cadence generally at the end of a calendar year. As I write this blog .NET 6.x is the current release and .NET 7.0 is due in about 6 months.

Microsoft has announced in March 2022 that .NET 5.0 will reach End of Support on May 8th 2022; see here for further details.

.NET is now available on many different hardware and software platforms, for example the image below is the download page for .NET showing .NET 6.0.2:

Example of .NET 6.0.3 Downloads

FPAssistant Binaries Options

We are happy to offer the FPAssistant Suite SDK on any of the .NET platforms but currently we do not build for each and every binary option; we offer 32-bit & 64-bit for both Intel and ARM processor, the .NET Standard 2.0.

But we are not sure weather to keep the binary options for .NET 5.x and 6.x when .NET 7.0 is released. Currently we are assuming that our customers who use .NET will be upgrading to keep up with the latest releases. If this is not the case then we would like to hear from you. The development team can always add a new project to the solution or if you are a customer that has access to the source code then you can do this yourself.

The issue for us come us when older .NET versions are removed from the latest Visual Studio hence we then need to keep installed older and previous versions to keep the binary offerings.

Also, we would like to hear from you regarding the delivery mechanism, is NuGet reasonable? At the moment we only have the binary for the .NET Standard 2.0; would you like to see the other .NET versions (5, 6 and 7) on NuGet as well?

FPAssistant with Geodetics calculated locally on computer

• .NET Framework 4.7 Windows 32-bit
• .NET Framework 4.7 Windows 64-bit

FPAssistant with Geodetics calculated through web API

• .NET Standard 2.0
• .NET Standard 2.1 (.NET 5)
• Portable Class Library

The geodetics calcs can be performed on the computer or through a web API, the code is written in C++ and can’t be used in sandbox application like UWP so the option to call the web API was added.

NOTE: PCL might be deprecated as some of the newer API’s being developed are not available on this target.

FPAssistant Suite SDK is 98% developed in C# and with rest in C++.

Future

Further support for ARM processors is expected this year with specific builds targeting the ARM64 platform but this will created on demand as most developers are likely to use the .NET Standard 2.0 or 2.1 builds.

If you have any questions, then please do make contact and we’ll try to get back to you soon.

.NET 5.0 Overview

Yesterday on the 10th November 2020 Microsoft released .NET 5.0 as a major release including C# 9.0 and F# 5.0 along with Visual Studio 16.8. It was only 6 weeks ago that I added a blog on .NET Standard 2.1 and .NET 5.0 Support

.NET 5.0 is available now to download for Windows, macOS and Linux OS’s for x86, x64, Arm32 and Arm64.

As a developer this brings together the .NET Framework and .NET Core under a single software provision.

For FPAssistant SDK this means lots of new benefits with little effort plus by using the new features in C# 9 we can enhance the SDK and offer better API’s. Key areas are:

• Adding macOS and Linux support as well as Windows 10, Android and iOS
• Performance improved
• ARM64 Support (Apple moving to their chips based on ARM / Microsoft releasing Windows on ARM [WOA])
• C# 9.0 – Language improvements

We have already starting work on supporting .NET 5.0 so watch this space for a release in due course but if you are in a hurry, then drop us an email and we’ll get you a beta release to play with. This means that support for Portable Class Library (PCL) will be dropped soon.

Further reading…

Microsoft: Announcing .NET 5.0