.NET 7.0?

[michaelcsikos]

".NET 7 will be supported for 18 months as a standard-term support (STS) release (previously known as a current release)." Are than any compelling reasons to migrate, and when will CSLA support it?

[rockfordlhotka]

CSLA 6 works with .NET 7 today.

CSLA 7 will target .NET 7, but that's a minor formality, since no code changes are required for that to happen. However, CSLA 7 will include some breaking changes because it is a major version update, and I'm not going to rush those breaking changes out the door - especially since CSLA 6 works with .NET 7 today.

In terms of compelling reasons to migrate to .NET 7, I think there are a couple

1. Don't fall behind - it'll be easier to go from 7 to 8 than 6 to 8 based in historical experience
2. Microsoft put a lot of work into performance in .NET 7, and they've published some blog posts about it; specially for aspnetcore there are some major improvements apparently
3. It sounds like they did a lot of stability work in MAUI, so if you are using MAUI it is probably a worthy upgrade
4. They continued to improve Blazor with some features, and some improvements around AOT (ahead of time compilation), which could be compelling

Mostly it seems like points 1 and 2 are the primary drivers imo.

[michaelcsikos]

1,2 and 4 are good reasons for us. Thanks for the quick response.

[kcabral817]

Falling behind is muy bad. I just spent the last month upgrading .net framework to core and ef to ef core. What a nightmare.

[rockfordlhotka]

That was a big jump though - because modern .NET is basically a reimplementation of the whole platform, just based on .NET Framework.

Moving from 3.1 to 6 takes some real effort, but 5 to 6 and 6 to 7 have been relatively easy. Hopefully that trend continues!

[Chicagoan2016]

Does it mean we don't have to target library projects to .NET Standard, Classic UI to .NET Framework 4.XX etc.?
:)

[Chicagoan2016]

I created a Winforms application in VS 2022, targeting .NET 7 and it works!!!!!!

[michaelcsikos]

WinForms isn't dead yet!

[Chicagoan2016]

@michaelcsikos yes and MVVM in winforms is right around the corner
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/winforms-enhancements-in-dotnet-7/

[rockfordlhotka]

If you aren't beholden to legacy code, you can use DI (and thus MVVM) in WinForms and WPF today. The real blocker is the massive amounts of legacy code in existing apps that can't be easily converted to a DI/MVVM model.

Yes, MVVM without DI requires extra support/work, but with DI, MVVM is extremely smooth., and you can use DI with WinForms as long as legacy code isn't an issue.

Just change Program.cs to create the first form via DI, and thereby any subsequent forms are created via DI - which means that a form can require a viewmodel via its constructor, and all of a sudden you are writing WinForms code that is comparable to aspnetcore or Blazor. It is really smooth!

[rockfordlhotka]

I just double-checked, and the Windows Forms example in the main branch is a basic example of this:

https://github.com/MarimerLLC/csla/tree/main/Samples/WinFormsExample/WinFormsExample