Telerik Reporting to drop .NET2.x, .NET3.0, VS2005 and VS2008 support in Q2 2013

by Reporting Team | Comments 6

Yes, it is about time, and you, our users, have confirmed it in the several polls we ran on the topic. As of Q2 2013 (expected in June 2013), Telerik Reporting will stop supporting .NET2.x, .NET3.0x as well as VS2005 and VS2008. This way the small percentage of our users still using .NET2 and .NET3.0 have several months to migrate their projects to newer .NET versions (.NET 3.5 SP1, .NET4.x). Alternatively, these projects can continue to run against .NET2 or .NET3.0, but they will not be able to use newer versions of Telerik Reporting.

Why the change?

  • The most important reason by far is that Telerik Reporting needs to evolve, and older .NET versions are hindering this process. For example, .NET3.5 SP1 comes with support for LINQ and REST, which are not available in previous .NET versions. We are working on a new charting engine, which will use these new components, and will require browsers which support HTML5, such as IE9;
     

    Source: Microsoft
     
  • It is time to move on. .NET Framework 2.0 was released 7 years ago (2/17/2006) and Microsoft ended its mainstream support on 4/12/2011. The mainstream support for .NET 3.0 and all of its service packs ended on 7/12/2011;
  • There are 3 newer .NET framework versions which developers can use: .NET 3.5 SP1+, .NET4.0, and .NET4.5. The upgrade process is fairly easy and straight-forward. In addition, the .NET Framework is now a component of the Windows OS, which means that [in theory] end users always have the latest .NET version installed.

Again, it is not necessary to upgrade your .NET2 and .NET3.0 projects unless you would like to use new versions of Telerik Reporting. The change will take effect in June 2013, so you have several months to prepare. The last major version to support .NET2.x, .NET3.0x, VS2005 and VS2008 will be Q1 2013 (due in February 2013).

Information on Microsoft’s .NET support:

About the author

Vassil Petev

Vassil Petev

has been helping Telerik become the top .NET company it is today since early 2003. During this adventure, he has been involved in technical support and sales, in building the renowned Telerik support team, in the creation of the Public Issue Tracker, and in project-managing the Reporting and WinForms product lines. Today he works with the brightest marketing folks to promote the ever-growing DevCraft portfolio. He loves the great outdoors, yachting, house music, DJing, and skiing.

@RadControls

Posted in: telerik-reporting visual-studio .NET3 .NET2 2008 2005

6 Comments

Dani
It's a good thing. Most dot net projects are easily upgradable and MS has good backward compatibility.
Jagz W
we have recently developed reports using telerik reporint in VS 2010. Does we need to change some thing in code?
rsb
Not sure who you polled before making this decision, but it did not include us.

For a small shop like ours, the testing associated with upgrading from .Net 2.0 is a huge deal as it requires a full regression test of our system.

What does staying with an older version mean for support from your support group?
Vassil Petev
@Jagz W: Thank you for the comment. If you are using .NET2 or .NET3.0, you would need to upgrade your project to .NET3.5+.
Vassil Petev
@rsb: Thank you for sharing your opinion. We ran several surveys - one in April and one December 2012 on the Telerik Reporting product pages and Forum pages on www.telerik.com. In December we also posted the same questions on Telerik's Facebook profile. We received 3,635 responses and 93.1% of the respondents either do not use .NET2/3.0 or plan to upgrade. Thus the decision top drop these platforms.
We will stop providing builds for .NET2/3.0 in June, but we will support all our clients who still use these platforms for at least one year (i.e. till June 2014). I hope this helps.
Jon E
Please could someone contact me via the email I provided, if you drop VS 2008 then there is no point renewing my subscription so I need to know this quite soon.

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