Kentico announced the launch of Kentico Xperience 13 in October 2020, with several features and benefits out of the box. Kentico 13 includes two massive shifts in technology. For one, it is now fully MVC; no more Portal Engine. Additionally, it has moved from .NET Framework to .NET Core. Both technology shifts mean massive performance gains for your website.
What are the advantages of MVC?
The full shift to MVC means no more web forms. Practically, that means better performance and scalability, as well as the ability to better structure and maintain your website.
What are the advantages of .NET Core?
The first thing to point out here is that .NET Framework is at end of life. Since previous Kentico versions used .NET Framework, this poses a big issue for older Kentico sites. The last version of .NET Framework that will ever exist is version 4.8 and was released in April of 2019.
From a hosting perspective, that means limited security support. Additionally, such sites no longer receive feature updates—and Kentico will stop supporting Portal Engine sites in September 2023.
If your business is concerned about lapses in security support, lack of feature enhancements, or lack of support from the platform itself, it’s time to start planning your upgrade.
Upgrading from Kentico 12 MVC to Kentico 13 .NET Core
With version 12, Kentico began offering MVC as a first-class solution, in addition to the Portal Engine approach. If your site is built on Kentico 12 MVC, we have great news: an upgrade to Kentico Xperience 13 will not require a complete rewrite.
Versions 12 MVC and 13 MVC use much of the same core functionality. Each site should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis—particularly your integrations. But the overall upgrade path should be relatively simple and will result in significant performance gains.
Upgrading from any Kentico .NET Framework instance to Kentico 13 MVC .NET Core
On the other hand, the upgrade path from .NET Framework does require a complete rewrite, as the underlying technology has changed drastically.
With this upgrade, the rewrite will take websites from Portal Engine to MVC, and from .NET Framework to .NET Core. In these cases, the performance gains will be massive. Websites on Kentico 13 are seeing incredible lift in performance. But this is a complete rewrite, so the majority of your older Kentico code cannot be reused. Depending on your site complexity, this could be a significant investment.
Regardless of what Kentico version you’re currently on, it is time to upgrade your website to .NET Core, the future of .NET.