Chordious 2.6 now available

Chordious 2.6 is now available! But what happened to 2.3 through 2.5? I’ll explain.

A month ago I released Chordious 2.2, which included the scattered, unreleased work I’d done in the previous year. Part of the reason the work was so scattered (besides the pandemic) was the difficulty I had working on the Chordious code.

I’ve been working on Chordious since 2013, and the current codebase was established in 2015 when I started work on Chordious 2.0. I built on top of the .NET Framework, and while it has served me well for years, it’s starting to show its age.

Long story short: the Windows-only .NET Framework has been replaced with the new cross-platform .NET, and over the past couple years I’ve been slowly moving all of my C# development onto it. Mostly new projects, but I’ve also had success upgrading some of my older ones.

The problem with Chordious has been its sheer size and variety of features. For a while the new .NET versions didn’t have everything Chordious needed, so I couldn’t upgrade.

But now, with the release of .NET 6, I’ve finally been able to take the plunge and upgrade. So that’s today’s release: Chordious 2.6, aka Chordious upgraded to .NET 6.

Feature-wise nothing’s really changed, but on the developer side I’ve got access to all the latest tools and release automation I use with my other .NET 6 projects. From a user perspective, the only thing you might notice is that the downloads are a bit larger.

See, early this year I started working on Chordious 3, which will also be based on .NET 6 and fully cross-platform. So Chordious 2.6 is a kind of transitional/maintenance release. When I released Chordious 2.2 last month, I found switching back and forth between the two codebases very annoying. The hardest part was going back to the manual release process (building a new installers, running tests, uploading them to the right places, updating links, etc.).

Chordious 2.6, on the other hand, is basically the old code with the new release automation. It’s a one-click process to create a new release. So while I’ll be focusing my attention on Chordious 3, I can still easily switch back to Chordious 2 and service critical bugfixes if need be.

Anyway, here’s the full change list for those upgrading from 2.2 to 2.6:

• Updated all projects to .NET 6
• Update SVG.NET to v3.4.0
• Switched from Extended WPF Toolkit v3.8.2 to Wpf Extended Toolkit v5.0.100
• Changed update code to check GitHub releases

So update to the latest version of Chordious today, and keep the feedback coming!

/jon

P.S. In case it wasn’t clear, Chordious 2.6 is built on the cross-platform .NET 6, but is still Windows-only.