Version 3 of the AWS SDK for .NET is available for production use in .NET 3.5 and 4.5

Posted on: Jul 28, 2015

Originally launched with 10 services in 2009, the AWS SDK for .NET has been offered as a single package that includes support for all AWS services. Since that time, the number of supported AWS services has grown to 52, and the size of the SDK has become larger. We began to hear more customer requests for splitting the SDK into smaller per-service modules, and this was our primary motivation to start the Version 3 SDK, which has been in preview since April this year.

The new version is distributed as several per-service packages on NuGet. The package names take the form of "AWSSDK - [service name]", allowing you to conveniently find, install, and depend only on the packages your application needs. This allows us to be more agile in delivering API updates to customers, and customers get the benefits of smaller dependency footprint, faster deployments, and the ability to individually update AWS service clients.

There are very few backward incompatible changes, and it is likely that you will not need to make any code changes to upgrade to the new version. The API changes are noted in the migration topic in the developer guide. If your project isn't affected, the only change needed to upgrade to Version 3 will be removing the legacy "AWSSDK" package from your project references and adding AWSSDK.ServiceName packages for each service the project uses. While we recommend upgrading to Version 3 to take advantage of the latest features, existing applications that depend on Version 2 will continue to work as expected.

The new version also ships with preview support for Portable Class Library and Xamarin, which allow you to target multiple platforms including Windows Store, Windows Phone 8.1, and Xamarin on iOS and Android. You need to use NuGet to download and reference the SDK's Portable Class Library assemblies. We encourage developers to try it out and give us feedback as we work to bring it to general availability soon!

As always, we invite developers to find us on GitHub and submit any feedback and issues to us in the Issues page.

To learn more, visit the AWS .NET Development Blog.