Version 3 of the AWS SDK for .NET Out of Preview

Back in February, we announced our intention to release a new major version of the AWS SDK for .NET. In April, we released a preview on NuGet. After receiving great feedback from users, today we are taking version 3 of the AWS SDK for .NET out of preview. This means the preview flag has been removed from the NuGet packages. The SDK is now included in our MSI installer from our website.

Version 3 is a new, modularized SDK. Every service is a separate assembly and distributed as a separate NuGet package. Each service has a dependency on a common runtime, AWSSDK.Core. This has been a major request from our users, especially now that AWS has grown to over 50 services. This design also gives SDK users better control over when to upgrade to the newest service updates.

We wanted to make the transition to version 3 as easy possible, so there are very few breaking changes to the public API. For the full list of changes, see our API Reference which contains a migration guide.

Our hope is that most users will just need to replace the old reference to version 2 and add the reference to the services they are using. If you are using NuGet to get the SDK, the reference to our core runtime package will be added automatically. If you are getting the SDK from the installer on our website, then you will need to add a reference to AWSSDK.Core.

Xamarin Preview

We recently announced a public preview of Xamarin support, which is part of version 3. Even though the SDK is now widely available, Xamarin and the Portable Class Library version of the SDK are still in preview. We encourage you to try the new Xamarin support and give us feedback, but we are not ready for users to publish production applications just yet. Users with an immediate need for Windows Phone and Windows Store support should continue using version 2 until the PCL version of the SDK version 3 is production-ready.

PowerShell

With our move to version 3, we have also switched our AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell to the new SDK. The version numbers for AWS SDK for .NET and our AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell are kept in sync, so AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell is getting a major version bump to 3. There are otherwise no major changes to AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell.

Changes to Our Installer

The installer has been updated to contain version 3 of the SDK, but it also contains version 2 for users who are not ready to move to version 3. The Portable Class Library version of the SDK (which includes Xamarin support) is only distributed through NuGet and will not be available through the installer. The Portable Class Library uses platform-specific dependencies which are automatically resolved when references are added through NuGet. This would be a complex process if done manually or without NuGet.

Packages on NuGet

For an up to date list of the version 3 NuGet packages check out the NuGet section in the SDK’s github README.md.