Announcing Release of Chocolatey Central Management 0.13.0

We are very happy to announce the release of version 0.13.0 of Chocolatey Central Management! This release contains a major overhaul of the underlying framework technologies that Chocolatey Central Management is built on, and other improvements for the web interface.

Discussed below are the main changes included in this release, but we also have the full set of release notes available providing more detail.

Removal of support for SQL Server 2012 / 2014

Since version 0.9.0 of Chocolatey Central Management it has been possible to use SQL Server 2012 to host the database that is required. Starting with this release SQL Server 2012 and 2014 are no longer supported for Chocolatey Central Management and SQL Server 2016 or later are required.

Encryption support required for SQL Connection String

In Chocolatey Central Management v0.13.0, the SQL connection mode has changed to secure-by-default. By default, all connection strings will assume Encrypt=true; and attempt a connection to the SQL Server over SSL. If you wish to disable this, you must pass a complete connection string to the /ConnectionString package parameter that contains an explicit Encrypt=false; parameter.

To accommodate this new default, the package installation will automatically add the TrustServerCertificate=True parameter to the connection string it constructs or receives if the initial connection to the SQL server fails without it.

If you would like to ensure a completely secure SQL connection, you must install a trusted SSL Certificate on the SQL Server instance before installing, upgrading, or reinstalling Chocolatey Central Management packages.

Updated target .NET Framework

All components of Chocolatey Central Management (database, service, and web) have been updated to .NET 8 which is supported by Microsoft until November 10 2026. .NET 6.0, used in previous versions, is only supported to November 12 2024.

Updated UI to use Choco Theme

Since the initial release of Chocolatey Central Management, the user interface has relied on a framework that was not consistent with the design of our other websites. Starting with Chocolatey Central Management 0.13.0, we updated the user interface to use the same choco-theme framework and functionality as our other websites, ensuring a consistent user experience.

Release notes

For more information on the breaking changes and improvements that were included in this release, please see the release notes.

Learn more

• Check out the documentation.
• Learn about other features available in Chocolatey for Business.
• Contact us to find out more and setup your evaluation of Chocolatey for Business today.