We’re excited to announce today that we’re starting to roll-out our deployment for SciChart WPF SDK v6, and an official BETA version is now available.

Over the coming weeks we will be beginning to deploy SciChart SDK v6, which features a completely re-written and improved DirectX rendering engine, .NET Core 3 support and more. The deployment will be phased due to changes we’ve had to make in our licensing system (more details on that below).

What’s New in SciChart SDK v6?

We’ve published a list of what’s new in SciChart SDK v6 over at this page: What’s new in SciChart SDK v6.

The biggest change is the introduction of our new Visual Xccelerator engine for up to 100x faster rendering in our WPF Charts. See here for how to Enable the Visual Xccelerator Engine in your applications.

We also now fully support .NET Core 3, have dropped the SharpDX dependency, and have had to change our licensing & obfuscation components as third party vendors that we were using before did not support .NET Core 3.

More info will be announced showing the performance test results in great detail when we go to full release!

Breaking Changes in SDK v6

We’ve published a list of Breaking Changes in SciChart WPF SDK v6 here. This release is highly backward compatible with SciChart WPF v5. Important to note:

• The minimum .NET Framework version is now .NET 4.5.2. We fully support up to .NET 4.8 and .NET Core 3 with this new release.
• Some deep API layers have been changed but most of the public facing API is exactly the same.
• SciChart.DirectX package is now obsolete. Use the new Visual Xccelerator Engine instead which is included in the SciChart package.
• We can and do provide upgrade consultancy services for customers with large or complex applications. Contact sales to get a quote!

Where to get SDK v6

At the moment we are publishing only to the abtsoftware-bleeding-edge NuGet feed. Instructions how to access this feed can be found here.

The SciChart.WPF.Examples source code for v6 can be fetched from Github here.

Shortly, we will be publishing to Nuget.org as well as an MSI Installer as well as a full release note as soon as we are ready.

Licensing SDK v6

The licensing mechanism is completely different in SciChart WPF SDK v6 vs. SciChart WPF v5. Your existing license keys won’t work. Over the coming weeks, we will be rolling out a new licensing server which will be used to activate / deactivate SciChart.

Why have we changed the licensing mechanism?

The old licensing server was reaching its limit of capacity so we have re-designed it as a cloud-based, micro-services .NET Core application based on Azure Functions 2.0 so that we can scale to the number of users and offer you the best possible service.

As part of this work, we’ve had to build a completely new in-house licensing mechanism which works across platforms. The 3rd party .NET Licensing component we were using stopped being supported, so we were unable to use this in .NET Core applications, and since we are now cross-platform and nobody sells cross-platform licensing solutions, we decided to make our own.

This means we’ve not only had to build a server, but also a new licensing component and also a new Cross Platform Licensing Wizard. You can download the Licensing Wizard now and get your free 30 days trial on any platform!

Pricing for SciChart WPF v6

The release for SciChart WPF v6 is imminent, and we will be announcing as soon as possible. Here’s some notes you need to be aware of prior to the release date.

• If you are a customer of SciChart in support subscription, you will be upgraded to SciChart WPF v6 for free. There’s nothing you need to do, and your license key will be re-issued for the next major version upon the release date.
• If you are considering whether to buy SciChart now or wait for the release, we are also planning to change our pricing structure and the cost of SciChart WPF will go up.
  • Therefore, its a very good time to contact sales to buy now as you’ll get the new release for free when it comes out.
  • If you want to preview the new pricing, see the development store here showing you what SciChart SDK v6 will cost when we go-live.
• If your support has lapsed, and you have an active project that still uses SciChart, I’d honestly recommend contacting sales and renewing now before the release date. It will be more cost effective to lock in the renewal price before our big announcement (see point 2 above)
• We will be announcing new product tiers where you can buy all our platforms at once (currently Windows, iOS, Android). These will be called Bundle packages, and will include 2D Charts, as well as Bundle SDK (2D & 3D) and Bundle Enterprise (2D & 3D plus Source Code).

Other than that, that’s it! Everything will be announced in due course and we will be rolling out this incredible new version of our high-performance, real-time charting software hopefully, very shortly.

What about Black Friday Sales?

Honestly, we don’t do Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, sorry!

We welcome your BETA Feedback!

Please give us your feedback about the new release. Any bugs you report will be fixed & published to the abtsoftware-bleeding-edge nuget feed as soon as possible.

Bear in mind this is BETA software. There are some crashes we know about, namely one or two exceptions in the D3D engine. We do want your feedback, and are working very hard to get it perfect and published as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Andrew
[SciChart Team Lead]

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