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Azure IoT SDKs released new Long-Term Support branch

By Yi Zhong, Program Manager II, Azure IoT Hub
The Azure IoT SDKs now have a new Long-Term Support (LTS) Branch. While we develop our SDKs on public GitHub repositories and ship a new version every other week to give developers access to the…

The Azure IoT SDKs now have a new Long-Term Support (LTS) Branch. While we develop our SDKs on public GitHub repositories and ship a new version every other week to give developers access to the latest and greatest features, we now also offer a branch that will only get critical bugs and security patches, starting in July 2017. Developers can now leverage the latest LTS version, release in January 2018, to develop clients that work with Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service.

The LTS branch offers customers a guarantee that they will benefit from any necessary security or critical bug fixes with minimal impact to their device’s code. At the same time, developers can access latest updates in the master branch of the repositories, staying on top of the technology and features, with a faster response and resolution time to posted issues. Best of both worlds!

The latest LTS version is accessible from GitHub under lts_2018_01 branch and from package managers such as NuGet, PiPy, apt-get, Maven, and NPM. All our SDKs follow semantic versioning. A major version change corresponds to a breaking change; a minor version change corresponds to adding functionality, and a patch version change corresponds to bug-fixes.

Our LTS timeline is:

  1. Every six months, a new version of LTS is released. This means that a new LTS branch is created for code access and a new set of LTS packages is released on the supported package manager. The versioning of LTS branch follows the master branch at the time of release. Deprecated APIs from the master branch are removed with major version update and removed in the subsequent release of a new LTS branch.
  2. A version is actively maintained for six months to receive security fixes and critical bug fixes. At the end of six months, a new version of LTS is released. The previous version will enter deprecated mode, where it will not receive any updates.
  3. After a one-year total lifetime, the corresponding branch will be removed from GitHub, but packages from package manager will still be available.

If you have any feedback on our design, please share it on UserVoice!

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