DotNetNuke 3.x Sunset

A question we get asked very often lately relates to our ongoing support for DotNetNuke 3.x on ASP.NET 1.1. We recently passed the one year anniversary for DotNetNuke 4.x on ASP.NET 2.0 ( November 7, 2005 ) and in our download statistics we have observed a very obvious trend. Currently DotNetNuke 4.x accounts for 85% of all release downloads. So with the demand slipping significantly for DotNetNuke 3.x, combined with the fact that we have a simple upgrade mechanism for users to move from DotNetNuke 3.x to DotNetNuke 4.x, we believe it is now time to "sunset" the DotNetNuke 3.x code branch. What this means is that all development effort will now be focussed on DotNetNuke 4.x, and there will only be future DotNetNuke 3.x releases if there are showstopper defects or critical security issues discovered in the current 3.x code.

The next major release will be DotNetNuke 4.4.0. The code base for DotNetNuke 4.4.0 is significantly different than DotNetNuke 4.3.7 - mainly due to the many performance improvements we have been working on in development. We will not be backporting these performance enhancements back to DotNetNuke 3.x. Although it is possible that some of the enhancements may be applicable to the DotNetNuke 3.x code base on ASP.NET 1.1, the only platform tested in the Performance Lab was DotNetNuke 4.x on ASP.NET 2.0. ASP.NET 2.0 forms a critical part of our baseline configuration going forward and is the only platform we will be actively maintaining.

The fact that DotNetNuke 3.x on ASP.NET 1.1 was fully supported for more than 12 months demonstrates our level of commitment to the community. We believe it is now time to commit 100% of our focus on ASP.NET 2.0, as we also prepare for some of the exciting new features which are coming in ASP.NET 3.0.