Recent releases and 8.0 beta

As you’ll see, we released 3 new versions of The Server Framework today. Of these, only the 7.3 release includes code changes. The 7.2 release updates almost every header file in the framework to remove ‘old style’ include guards and touches lots of source files to remove lint directives that we no longer use. This kind of change creates a lot of noise in an update and so it has been done separately to the functional changes to make it easier for users of the framework to see what has actually been changed in 7.3.

Release 7.3 is where the fun happens, with lots of changes and a couple of bug fixes.

Release 7.4 then removes support for Visual Studio 2015 and removes some code that has been deprecated for a while. It’s a clean up release.

The idea is, most people should move straight to 7.4. If you want to see exactly what has changed, then ask for 7.2 and 7.3 and compare the 7.3 tree to the 7.2 tree. If you find that you still need Visual Stuido 2015 then stick with 7.3 and get all the new stuff, but no further updates. If you still need some deprecated code, then stick with 7.3.

Almost everything “non-functional” in the 7.x releases has been to pave the way for the forthcoming 8.0 release which supports Linux and MacOS as well as Windows. Lots changes in 8.0 including the entire design of the socket code. This makes it easier to ‘plug in’ different platforms as back-ends and incorporates lots of stuff that we’ve learnt over the 20 years since we release the first version of the framework.

We are happy to announce that 8.0 is now in beta. If you’d like to take part in the beta then please get in touch.