• Performance – We have seen significant improvements in multiple areas.
• Cross Platform Support – Allowing for hosting and development on different OS.
• Easier Development Process – Improved config management, dependency injection, lesser lines of code, and portable libraries.
• Modern Tech – Microsoft released .NET Core in 2016 to support portability and a unified approach when it comes to implementing for different machines such as Web, Windows Desktop/Store/Phone, etc.
• Open Source – Transparency and abundance of support allowing the community to participate and have faster release cycles.

It’s long been a request to enable developer teams to work natively on both Windows and MacOS depending on personal preferences. With CMS 12 and Commerce 14 running on .NET 5 it’s much easier to share a single code base, but across different editors and operating systems.

As we release the new .NET 5 code base, the plugins/add-ons will be dependent on their creator to ensure that it is compatible with the new version. Please contact the creator of the plugins/add-ons you are interested in more information. Optimizely are migrating the addon packages we own to .NET 5 throughout 2021, please see status of the packages that have already been migrated.

The packages have been released on September 28, 2021 and is available on our nuget feed (CMS and Commerce). Sample codes can be found on GitHub.

Our documentation have been updated for the .NET 5 code base and can be found here (CMS and Commerce). Here are a few topics to help you get started on learning about our some of the important changes:

• Getting Started
• Dependency Injection
• Configuration
• Logging API

The Upgrade Assistant tool can help automate the transition from a CMS 11 project to CMS 12. Although the tool does help with the common tasks related to the migration, expect there will still be some manual migration tasks that needs to be performed. Please read the documentation for further detail. The move to .NET 5 also requires some changes to the PaaS environments for existing customers. Self-service tooling for transitioning to a .NET 5 environment is planned for later in the year.

Our intent is to not have any breaking changes, however please review our release notes for the latest changes.

We are currently working on support for .NET 6, and it looks like a trivial upgrade which won’t require any significant work for Optimizely customers, but as always, the devil is in the details. Our goal is to add support for .NET 6 with no breaking changes in Optimizely CMS or Commerce in spring / summer 2022.

Version 12 of Optimizely Content Cloud and version 14 of Optimizely Commerce Cloud is now released. If you are interested in accessing, please contact your customer success manager or account manager for more details.

The upgrade will not be the same as before

• Upgrading to .NET 5 will require a brand new environment for your DXP. Optimizely will be providing this to you at no additional cost to your license
• Your code will need to be migrated from your existing code base to .NET 5. Optimizely has built developer-facing tools to help run this process. This will require interaction from your development team

• Does it require recoding everything? – No, but it will require a migration of your existing code to the new code base
• Does it affect the data? – No, your data should not be affected
• Does it affect any existing integrations? – no, but you should run your new instance through UAT testing to assure that the code migration did not break any custom integrations
• Does it support any plug-ins/addons? – yes, new plug-ins or add-ons will need to be installed and configured

Yes - unless you fall under one of the scenarios:

• Upgrade from private cloud to public cloud (server bound to instance bound)
• Upgrade from either of the above to our cloud service.

Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager for details.

All new instances of our CMS and Commerce platforms will be:

• Provisioned in a new Linux environment
• Optimized for our version 12 (.NET 5) application

Yes – please contact your onboarding manager OR account executive to discuss options to have your instance and site provisioned in preparation for .NET 5.

• No – however this could represent an update to the existing application that your developers should review before starting your project
• As well, if there are key connectors/add-ons that are required for your project, we are migrating over these external tools as quickly as we can. If any are not ready for your project, we can provide a timeline on when these will be ready