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Breaking Change T1064071
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DevExpress products and components now require the DevExpress.Drawing assembly for deployment

What Changed

The DevExpress.Drawing assembly is now required for DevExpress products and components. This library contains cross-platform counterparts of the System.Drawing classes (Image, Bitmap, Font, Pen, Brush, and so on).

Reasons for Change

Microsoft marked the System.Drawing.Common library as Windows-specific in .NET 6 and higher. Review the following breaking change (BC) for more information: System.Drawing.Common only supported on Windows.

To maintain the functionality of our products within all supported non-Windows environments (Linux and macOS, Azure App Service, and Docker containers), we created a separate DevExpress.Drawing assembly that contains cross-platform counterparts of the System.Drawing classes affected by the above-mentioned BC (see the Affected APIs list for details). We already use this new API in our internal code. In the second half of 2022, we plan to revise our public API members and implement their cross-platform counterparts for use on non-Windows platforms. The new API will utilize the DevExpress.Drawing objects instead of the System.Drawing classes. If your app targets Windows, you can continue using the System.Drawing library.

With v22.2, we also expect to release another assembly that will contain our custom cross-platform rendering engine based on the SkiaSharp library.

How to Update Existing Apps

Add a reference to DevExpress.Drawing.dll to your application and include this assembly in your redistribution package. You can use our Project Converter tool to update the DevExpress NuGet package versions within your app or add necessary assembly references to your project.

See Also

DevExpress Cross-Platform Products — Getting Ready for .NET 7

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