.Net 5 public preview

As you probably know, we have been busy working on CMS 12 / Commerce 14, theof which has been to support .Net 5 as the underlying framework for our entire Content and Commerce platform. We’ve had a lot of great feedback from the closed beta and are pleased to announce our first public milestone for this release.

It is available here on GitHub for the duration of the public preview. If you want to take the preview for a spin, here is what you need to know:

• No production support and no hotfixes
• Stable APIs
• Final packages will be distributed via the normal nuget feed
• Please report any feedback to the public preview via GitHub
• Not yet supported to deploy/run in DXP

With those caveats in mind, to get started you probably want to install the project templates and CLI tool as explained in the preview repository and create a new site from there e.g. starting from a blank site:

dotnet new epicmsempty --name ProjectName

We intend to follow this with two releases; a fully supported release for new customers targeted in Q3, followed by a General Availability for all customers in Q4. (The primary reason for the gap between the two is to support and enable easy migrations via self-service tooling and assisted migrations).

Why are we doing this?

• Building the most advanced Digital Experience Platform
• To fully support the latest technologies from Microsoft
• .Net Framework was designed for one machine, whereas .Net 5 is designed from the ground up for high performance web applications and microservices in the cloud
• Benefits of .Net 5 include
  • High Performance
  • Scalable
  • Cross Platform
  • Specific Services for web, data and AI/ML
  • Open Source
• Enables customers and partners to optimize the speed of the experience you deliver, the gains can be massive, ranging from 30% to 1200% in some situations (not Optimizely specific)
• Developing microservices architecture has the potential to improve the speed of delivering and rolling out new functionality
• Enables better headless support - .Net SDK (delivery core), JS SDK all abstracted from the CMS

DXP on Linux

We expect that as more developers start to work with .Net 5, Linux will become the hosting platform of choice, which is why we've decided that to exclusively run CMS 12 and Commerce 14 on Linux on our DXP. This decision allows us to support a single environment type for our service, but also gives flexibility in how you develop or run CMS 12 / Commerce 14 if you choose to maintain your own infrastructure.

Customers using CMS 11 / Commerce 13 or earlier versions will not be affected, and will stay on the Windows-based environments until they choose to upgrade.

You can still develop on either Windows and deploy to Linux instances for testing and production, which we expect to be a normal pattern for development.