.NET 5 and the road ahead

By the end of 2020 Microsoft will have released their brand new version of .NET. The final unification of .NET Framework and .NET Core.

*UPDATE* Because of Covid-19, .NET 5 was downscaled, and therefore we are not aiming for .NET 5, but .NET 6.

Entity 5 is currently using the .NET Framework 4.8. There are a lot of breaking changes between 4.8 and 5, but our plan is to embrace the new technology when it has stabilized. The .NET 5 will not be a long term supported (LTS) version, but .NET 6 arriving just next year will. 

.NET is huge, and we are only using parts of it, so to be specific about what parts of .NET we will use we have written this short article. Read more about .NET 5 here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-preview-4-and-our-journey-to-one-net/

We already use Entity Framework 6.x as our database framework. So we will continue to follow the upgrade path here.

We use WebApi 2.x, and will also follow this upgrade path. This is I.E. used for the headless solutions we currently provide in Entity Commerce.

For the rendering of web pages, our goal is to change our current Layout Engine with Razor Pages. This will also allow for Blazor applications, and much more going forward. This also fixes the main breaking change between the current .NET version and the new one.

For other .NET 5 improvements, we will embrace them one at a time when applicable.

SQL Server continues in it's own pace, and we also follow this upgrade path when servers are regularly upgraded or swapped out.