We are proud to announce the brand new official version of nopCommerce - 4.00!

In this version, our development efforts were focused mainly on moving nopCommerce to ASP.NET Core 2.0, performance and architecture improvements, but also we have made some further enhancements and bug fixing. You can find the full release notes here.

Please find out more about the highlights of this version:

Migration to ASP.NET Core 2.0

It was the biggest challenge for us because we always try to follow the newest technology trends and give our users the better experience. We made a decision firstly target .NET Framework 4.6.1 and not .NET Core. The reason was that we plan to use .NET Core only when EF Core team starts supporting all ORM functionality from the classic Entity Framework 6. Such as lazy loading, etc (they plan to do it in Q1-Q2 2018).

Please note that the release notes don’t include all changes caused by migration to ASP.NET Core. Here is a separate upgrade guide for developers on how to migrate your existing projects and plugins to this version. The number of changes is really huge!

Significant performance enhancements

We bet you already know that ASP.NET Core speeds up performance a lot. The new version of nopCommerce is much faster, and it’s going to be even better in 4.10 when we will fully move nopCommerce to .NET Core.

The changes we made in this version affect not only migration to ASP.NET Core. We’ve made many other changes to increase performance. The most important improvements are here:

Moved javascript files and inline scripts to the footer

Schedule tasks are rewritten to be run using HTTP requests (not in background)

Response compression

Now generated bundles and minified files are stored on the file system

More SQL Server indexes

Cache stores, currencies, languages between requests (do not load them for each HTTP request)

Faster Azure BLOB support (caching added)

A lot of other performance changes

Other improvements

Upload plugins

In this version we allow store owners to upload plugins and themes instead of putting them manually into "\Plugins" or "\Themes" directory using FTP. Now you can easily upload ZIP file from your PC.

Better UI/UX in admin area. Nested settings

We have added nested settings to all settings pages for your convenience.

There were a lot of other enhancements. But of course the most important one was moving to ASP.NET Core. It was our biggest focus!

You can download the new version of nopCommerce here.

It would be great if you could share the news about the 4.00 version on your Twitter and Facebook accounts (please use hashtag #nopCommerce).