System requirement changes

• Microsoft Azure SDK 2.9.5 required for Microsoft Azure Cloud Services projects (no longer supported in Visual Studio 2012).
• Added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016.
• Ended support of Internet Explorer 9 and 10 for the Kentico administration interface.

New features

Platform

• Continuous integration – Added support for most types of objects in the system. See Object types supported by continuous integration.
• Continuous integration – New option to exclude individual objects from continuous integration (based on code names for standard objects and alias paths for pages).
• Smart search – New status for smart search indexes that indicates when an index requires a rebuild after configuration changes.
• MVC – New Kentico.Membership integration package that provides an API for working with Kentico users and roles in MVC applications. See Working with users on MVC sites.
• Passwords – New storage format for user passwords that utilizes the PBKDF2 key derivation function. Provides stronger security than the older password formats. If you wish to switch to the new format, you need to reset the passwords of all existing users. For more information, see Setting the user password format.
• Export and Import – Added a search filter to the object selection step of the export and import wizards. The filter allows easy selection of specific objects in cases where a large number of objects is available.
• Membership – The listings in the Users and Roles applications now provide mass actions for deleting multiple users or roles.
• New Object types tab in the System application, which displays the “object type” identifiers and other details for the available object types in the system. Administrators and developers can use the information to identify Kentico objects in various scenarios (for example when preparing URLs for REST requests, defining cache dependencies, etc.).
• Performance – Integrated CodeDOM providers that use the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) compiler. This improves the compilation performance of the Kentico project and significantly speeds up the first load time of websites. The providers are not added automatically when upgrading existing projects – we recommend installing them manually after you perform the upgrade.
• Performance – Significantly improved the speed of web requests that cause logging of synchronization tasks (Staging or Integration bus), trigger marketing automation processes or actions, or trigger advanced workflow actions.
• Automated testing – New Kentico.Libraries.Tests integration package, which separately provides all functionality related to automated testing of the Kentico API. The testing API is no longer available directly within Kentico projects or the main Kentico.Libraries integration package.
• Automated testing – Faked providers for unit tests now support methods that create or update faked data. See Faking Info and Provider objects in unit tests.
• Event log – New global events that allow developers to customize how the system logs records into its event log. See Customizing event logging for more information and an example.
• Staging – New global event that allows developers to customize how the system handles child data when processing incoming staging tasks. See Customizing staging of child and binding objects for more information and an example.
• Microsoft Azure – When performing the upgrade for Microsoft Azure Cloud Services projects, the system now attempts to automatically update the Azure configuration files (ServiceConfiguration.cscfg, ServiceDefinition.csdef). In most cases, it is no longer necessary to manually transfer your configuration to new files.
• Amazon S3 – Updated the Amazon Web Services SDK for .NET to version 3.1.9.0. Amazon S3 file storage can now be used with all Amazon data centers.
• The styles of the Kentico administration interface can be extended or customized using the new App_Themes\Default\Bootstrap\custom.less file. See Customizing CSS for the administration interface.
• The Kentico.Libraries integration package was reorganized to include only the API commonly required by external applications and reduced in size. Libraries containing controls and other web form presentation API were moved into the new Kentico.Libraries.Web.UI package, which can be installed separately.
• UniGrid – Developers can now define mass actions within the configuration of UniGrid controls. Includes a predefined action for deleting Kentico objects displayed by the UniGrid.
• Security – Added new methods to the API that allow developers to perform custom redirects with protection against unvalidated redirection attacks. See Unvalidated redirects.
• DataQuery API (ObjectQuery, DocumentQuery) – The where condition methods in the DataQuery API now support column values of the long type (long integer number).
• Email templates – Added preview functionality for email templates. You can now preview email templates by sending draft emails to specific email addresses.
• Email templates – Added the option to set the “Reply-To” value for individual email templates.
• Localization – Users with sufficient permissions can now edit global resource strings in the Localization application, even without the Global administrator privilege level.
• Versioning – Reducing the value of the Version history length settings for object versioning and page versioning now automatically clears the version history for all objects or pages according to the new limit.