We first published SaxonCS 11.x using .NET 5. Since then, .NET 5 has reached “end of life” and .NET 6 has become the recommended “long term service” release of the .NET framework.
This puts us in a bit of a bind.
On the one hand, we try not to make disruptive changes in a maintenance release if we can avoid it. Consequently, we’re reluctant to suddenly require all of our customers who might be building applications with SaxonCS 11.x to upgrade to .NET 6 just because they want to install a new maintenance release.
On the other hand, it is becoming difficult to support .NET 5 applications in some environments. Ubuntu 22.04, for example, doesn’t ship with the SSL libraries that .NET 5 requires. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to deploy SaxonCS 11.x built with .NET 5 in some environments.
As a compromise, we’ve published a set of SaxonCS 11.4 releases built against .NET 6. In order to distinguish them from their .NET 5 counterparts, we’ve named them “SaxonCS-b6”. The “b6” is both a nod towards their .NET 6 provenance and a way of identifying them as “beta”. There are no code changes in these builds, they should perform exactly as the SaxonCS 11.4 release does, but they have not been tested extensively.
They are identified as “SaxonCS-b6 11.4.1”. You can get the platform-specific release artifacts from our downloads area and the NuGet package has been uploaded and should be available soon.
(Speaking of NuGet, I should also confess that I published the wrong SaxonCS 11.4.0 artifact. The SaxonCS 11.4.0 release on NuGet will only work on 64 bit platforms. I republished the corrected, architecture independent release as SaxonCS 11.4.1 yesterday.)
We’ll have to cross this bridge again if we publish another Saxon 11.x maintenance release. Please let us know what works for you, and what doesn’t.