We are aware that ASP.NET 4.6 was officially launched back in July 2015 and typically we are quick to update – but this particular update took us a while to get in – so I wanted to let you know what was going on.
When ASP.NET 4.6 was officially released we had every intention of getting it on to our hosting platform but during our testing phase we saw reports coming out about bugs found in ASP.NET 4.6 with recommendations not to install it in production. Since ASP.NET 4.6 was an in-place update, rather than a side-by-side install, we opted to be cautious. There were some patches and workarounds released to address some bugs – but we did not want to rely on patches and workarounds on our production hosting platform. Therefore we decided to wait until an official update, which came as ASP.NET 4.6.1 in November 2015.
We’ve been using the Windows update and our regular monthly maintenance window to install updates, so in November we expected the latest update to appear in the monthly update, just like other minor versions in the past. However, in the case of ASP.NET 4.6.1 – it wasn’t in Windows Update. We don’t know what goes on within Microsoft as they QA new updates, but if ASP.NET 4.6.1 wasn’t cleared for mass distribution, we figured that we should wait until it made it into Windows Update before putting it into production servers. We thought approval for mass release would come soon – but that was not the case.
Finally, a little over a week ago, we saw that ASP.NET 4.6.1 made it into Windows Update but it was only available for Windows 2012 R2 server. For our Windows 2012 platform, we have a mix of Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2 servers. So we updated all of our Windows 2012 R2 servers with ASP.NET 4.6.1 during February’s maintenance window, while our Windows 2012 servers remain at ASP.NET 4.5.2.
It did take us a while to update to ASP.NET 4.6 but when it comes to our production servers that power our customers websites, we want to be careful when making updates that could potentially cause problems for customers.
If you ever want to target a newer ASP.NET version that is not on your current server, please contact our technical support team and we may be able to move your site to the server environment with the ASP.NET version that you want to use.