SAP announces .NET Connector 3.1

The SAP .NET Connector (sapnco.dll) is a central component for all interfaces that are programmed in Microsoft .NET and access SAP classically via RFC.

And even if the current marketing around RESTful and OData may make it look different - many interfaces continue to use the classic RFC API - for good reasons.

But the previous .NET Connector was still developed for .NET 4.0. .NET Core or .NET 5.0/6.0 has not been considered here at all so far. Apart from patches, there has been nothing new here for years.

And a maintenance end date has been fixed for a long time: on 31.12.2022 the maintenance should end.

New version 3.1 in Q3/2022

Now it seems that someone at SAP has also noticed the end of maintenance.

The release note for the NCo (SAP Note 856863) has now been supplemented by the statement that version 3.1 will be released in Q3/2022 and that it will also support other framework versions. A support of the .NET Core based versions (.NET 6.0 and .NET 7.0) can be expected presumably at least.

In addition, it is mentioned that the maintenance end of NCo 3.0 could be postponed by one year.

All in all, the announcement is very vague, which does not really adds planning safety for current projects.

Open Source Alternatives

The gaps left by SAP Nco's lack of development in recent years have been picked up by a number of open source projects.

These are based on the C/C++ SAP Netweaver RFC library. This was - in contrast to .NET Connector - constantly developed further by SAP.

Among them is our own .NET Connector: dbosoft YaNco, which is currently the most popular open source alternative for the .NET Connector (according to Github Stars).

We are therefore particularly curious to see whether SAP will actually manage to deliver an improved programming model with the .NET Connector 3.1, or whether it will simply stick to providing support for .NET Core.