Beamable July 2023 Release Review

Since the last release blog, Beamable has released SDK versions 1.16.1, 1.16.2, and 1.17.0. Here are the highlights from the previous month of releases. 

Command Line Interface Improvements

In Beamable 1.16.2, we added the beam version command suite, which allows a developer to easily update and manage the installed CLI tool. In 1.17.0, we added the get connection string command, which will enable a developer to get a direct connection string to a Mongo storage object. Direct Mongo access can be critical to developer workflows. Additionally, in 1.17.0, new CLI projects will automatically include a version control file that helps avoid security leaks. The version control file can be re-generated using the generate ignore-file command. If you haven’t clicked on any of those links, check out this one about getting started with the Beam CLI.

Stability and Bug Fixes

The last three releases, especially 1.17.0, bring many quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes to the Unity SDK and CLI tools. A complete list can be found in the changelogs. In previous versions of the Beamable SDK, there were intermittent bugs when entering and exiting playmode quickly. The Federated Auth SDK had a few typing inconsistencies. All of these issues have been resolved. 

Dotnet Compatibility 

In Beamable 1.16.2, the Beam CLI added support for net7. In Beamable 1.17.0, the Beamable Common and UnityStubs nuget packages also support net7 and netstandard 2.0. Previously, Standalone Microservices couldn’t be used with Unity 2020 because the common project couldn’t be built for a Unity 2020-compatible Dotnet version. However, the inclusion of netstandard 2.0 allows Standalone Microservices to be used alongside Unity 2020, 2021, and 2022. We are continuing to extend Dotnet support for the rest of the Microservice code base. We are anticipating the release of net8 in November, and we are excited to bring full net7 support to Microservices in a future release. 

Changelog

Full changelogs can be found at https://beamable.github.io/changes