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Saxonica's plans for supporting Saxon-HE on the .NET Framework

Added by Dave Dezinski over 1 year ago

I would like to know if Saxonica can share what their plans are for supporting the version of Saxon-HE for the .NET Framework. I see that version 10.9 was released about week ago, so it appears to still be supported currently. My question is can you share how much longer it will continue to be supported for? If I click on the Download link the only .NET versions available are for .NET 5/6 and I see no mention of 10.x there unless I go to the Downloads Info page. It's also stated on the Downloads page that Saxon 11 is considered the most stable and reliable version which leads me to believe that it's only a matter of time before 10.x is no longer supported.

Thanks


Replies (2)

RE: Saxonica's plans for supporting Saxon-HE on the .NET Framework - Added by Michael Kay over 1 year ago

We'll "support" it for as long as .NET Framework is "supported". Inverted commas there, because it's an open question what "supported" really means.

In practice, we hope we won't have to produce any further maintenance releases. We'll fix bugs if they are show-stoppers, that is, if there's no effective workaround or if there's a significant security vulnerability, but we won't fix things if there's a straightforward workaround.

We've no idea, of course, how long this will be. But there's an expectation that .NET Framework is likely to continue in use for many years for running legacy applications, while ceasing to be a platform of choice for anything new. Bugs in workloads that have been running in legacy mode for many years, in our experience, are extremely rare.

RE: Saxonica's plans for supporting Saxon-HE on the .NET Framework - Added by Dave Dezinski over 1 year ago

Thanks for your candor in responding. As far as I know Microsoft doesn't have any plans to sunset the .NET Framework in the near term, so we could be talking about quite a while before it's no longer supported. My concern is mainly about addressing any security vulerabilities and show-stopper bugs that may come up. Sounds like that's something Saxonica has already thought about and is planning on addressing in the near term at least, I understand that it's not something you can put a definite timeframe on.

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