Drop support for .NET 2.0 and 3.5?

[Shay Rojansky]

Hi everyone.

During the work on async support, I started thinking about dropping support for the old .NET versions in Npgsql.

Here is a table of the .NET versions and their official end-of-life schedules. .NET 2.0 reached it's mainstream end-of-life in 2013, and .NET 3.5 will do the same in January. Support for the old versions has its price: we can't use new language features (e.g. the new async support, somewhat complicated support for Linq), we have to run twice unit tests more times, etc. It's a bit hard to imagine a serious project that hasn't upgraded to .NET 4.0, and which still regularly updates to new version of Npgsql. Unfortunately, dropping only .NET 2.0 and keeping .NET 3.5 won't provide much help - async is available from .NET 4.0 and on.

So, what do you guys think? Do you think we should drop support for the old .NET version in Npgsql 2.3?

[Francisco Figueiredo Jr.]

On Saturday, July 26, 2014 4:41:13 AM UTC-3, Shay Rojansky wrote:

Hi everyone.

Hi, Shay!
 

During the work on async support, I started thinking about dropping support for the old .NET versions in Npgsql.

Here is a table of the .NET versions and their official end-of-life schedules. .NET 2.0 reached it's mainstream end-of-life in 2013, and .NET 3.5 will do the same in January. Support for the old versions has its price: we can't use new language features (e.g. the new async support, somewhat complicated support for Linq), we have to run twice unit tests more times, etc. It's a bit hard to imagine a serious project that hasn't upgraded to .NET 4.0, and which still regularly updates to new version of Npgsql. Unfortunately, dropping only .NET 2.0 and keeping .NET 3.5 won't provide much help - async is available from .NET 4.0 and on.

So, what do you guys think? Do you think we should drop support for the old .NET version in Npgsql 2.3?

I agree with you that using .net 4.0+ features would be better. And I think we should drop the support for old frameworks if they aren't much relevant anymore.

I just don't know how we could check how many people use Npgsql with .net 2.0 and 3.5 but I think that those project who really need support for those versions can still continue to use Npgsql 2.2.x release.

I think we could call it 3.0 instead?