Platform Differences to Consider

Despite of being a successor of .NET Framework, .NET Core and .NET 5+ do not provide full feature parity and brings various breaking changes that developers must understand when implementing new server-side code or migrating existing one:

• New web framework

  Aras Innovator has been migrated from classic ASP.NET web framework to run on ASP.NET Core - an open-source and cross-platform framework for building modern web applications with the aim to provide the access to modern features, better development experience and greater performance.

  Aras Innovator now uses Kestrel as a primary web server – lightweight cross-platform web server for ASP.NET Core applications. When installed via MSI package, IIS is used only as a reverse proxy while still being configured via web.config. To learn more about IIS hosting configuration please visit ASP.NET Core Module article.

• Unsupported API and breaking changes

  There are number of APIs and technologies are not yet ported to .NET Core and .NET 8.0, considered as deprecated (thus no longer supported on a target platform and throws “Unsupported” exception at runtime), have breaking changes in functionality behavior, or are completely removed.

  Please see the following official Microsoft documentation about the differences between .NET Framework and .NET 8.0:

• Assembly Redirection

  In prior releases, when developing a server method that calls custom DLL that references different version of a DLL that is also used by the Innovator, there is a chance to receive runtime errors due to an assembly version mismatch. To address this, assembly binding instructions must be added to the web.config file to instruct the runtime to properly load an assembly.

  In .NET Core and .NET 8.0 there is no longer such concept of binding redirections so no changes in web.config are needed. Aras Innovator will automatically pick up and load an assembly from application binaries folder.