In this topic
- Supported platforms
- Visual Studio
- .NET Framework
- Support for Visual Studio 2017
- Deprecation Announcement
- .NET and VCPP Samples
- Type changes
Supported platforms
The following subsections highlight development and deployment platform support changes for ArcGIS 10.6. For complete information on supported platforms, along with hardware and software requirements, see System Requirements.
Visual Studio
At ArcGIS 10.6, .NET development using Community, Professional, and Enterprise editions of Visual Studio 2015 or 2017 is supported.
.NET Framework
.NET 4.5 is a minimum requirement for any .NET development with ArcGIS 10.6. In fact, it is a prerequisite for installing ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Engine for Windows. Desktop ArcObjects SDK for 10.3.1 was the last release of the Desktop SDK to ship with support for .NET 3.5 Framework.
At 10.6, the Desktop ArcObjects SDK continues to ship with .NET Framework 4.5 as the default (same as 10.5). The 10.6 Desktop ArcObjects SDK will install PIAs built against .Net Runtime 4.0 and all new extension development should be started on NET Framework 4.5 or later (same as 10.5).
Visual Studio 2017
The 10.6 SDK introduces support for Visual Studio 2017, Microsoft's latest edition of its IDE. Support for Visual Studio 2017 replaces support for Visual Studio 2013. With 10.6, Visual Studio 2013 is no longer supported.
Visual Studio 2017 has certain feature changes that developers should be aware of. Specifically, Visual Studio 2017 supports Side-by-side installation (SxS) of different levels of Visual Studio for the same version (eg Professional installed SxS with Enterprise).
Visual Studio 2017 also makes the integrated help viewer an optional component. You must specifically select the help viewer to install it with Visual Studio 2017. This change may lead to confusion when installing the ArcObjects SDK integrated help relative to the ArcObjects SDK help documentation feature in the install. Installation of the SDK integrated help for Visual Studio 2017 is fully documented here: Installing ArcObjects Help with Visual Studio 2017.htm (note: this topic is available on the web site only).
Deprecation Announcement
10.6, and future minor "dot" releases (10.6.1, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, etc.) are the last releases in which the ArcObject SDK .NET help will be provided as integrated help within Visual Studio.
For the next minor releases or major releases of the ArcObjects SDK, the SDK help will continue to be available online, and installing a copy of the help content locally will be an option, but local help content will not be integrated into the Visual Studio help viewer.
.NET and VCPP Samples
At 10.6, the .NET and VCPP samples are available online for download from https://github.com/esri/arcobjects-sdk-community-samples
Samples for Desktop .NET and VCPP and Server .NET are installed as zip files in the DeveloperKit->Samples folder. Please copy the sample zip files to your My Documents folder and unzip. If you are using the sample data zip it should be copied to the same location.
Note: There is a maximum file path limit of 260 characters for some zip utilities in Windows. If you encounter an error unzipping the samples due to the maximum file length being exceeded please copy the samples zip file to a different location with a shorter path.
Type changes
Please refer to Type Changes between ArcGIS 10.5 and 10.6 for the full list.
To use the code in this topic, reference the following assemblies in your Visual Studio project. In the code files, you will need using (C#) or Imports (VB .NET) directives for the corresponding namespaces (given in parenthesis below if different from the assembly name):
- ArcGIS Desktop