Question

What .NET Frameworks does BarTender 2022 use?

Applicable to 

BarTender 2022

Answer

.NET 5 is used by two major components in BarTender 2022:

• The Integration Service used to host integrations created by Integration Builder
• The BarTender REST API

The rest of BarTender uses .NET Framework 4.7.2, which is a separate framework and is still supported.

As a general rule, our policy is to update third-party frameworks and libraries when we release major versions of BarTender unless there is a compelling need to update it to fix a defect or security issue.  This helps avoid undesirable changes to the product being introduced in service releases, ensuring that anyone who purchases a major version of a product (such as BarTender 2022 R1) can continue to use service releases for that product (such as BarTender 2022 R5).

Security Considerations

Certain cybersecurity third-party providers are identifying .NET 5 as a critical security vulnerability for the sole reason that Microsoft has declared .NET 5 out of support as of May 10, 2022, and has not committed to providing future updates.

Listed below is additional context on how this relates to BarTender 2022:

• The severity level is misleading.  .NET 5 does not currently have any known security vulnerabilities.  Moreover, BarTender’s usage of the .NET 5 framework is narrow in scope — both in terms of the .NET functionality used and the components of BarTender using it — making it unlikely that any vulnerability identified within .NET 5 would affect BarTender customers.
• If any security vulnerability is identified in a supported version of BarTender, we would release an update to address it as quickly as possible. As no present security vulnerability exists in BarTender caused by the usage of .NET 5, we currently do not have plans to update that component in BarTender 2022.

Future major version releases of BarTender will be updated to use the latest possible version of .NET.