We are excited to announce our new major Xomega release 8.10 for Visual Studio 2019.
The main focus of this release is upgrading to the latest .NET Core 3.1 technologies for building web and desktop applications. This includes adding support for the new Blazor Server web apps, upgrading WPF and EF6 to their latest .NET Core versions, using ASP.NET Core REST services for multi-tier apps, and switching to use asynchronous operations both on the client and server sides.
The legacy .NET Framework technologies, such as WebForms and WCF, have been also upgraded to support async operations. We recommend to use them only if you want to add Xomega to your existing systems that use these technologies, or if you are more familiar with them, and would like to try out Xomega before moving up to the latest .NET Core technologies. Since most of the code is shared, you can easily switch from one technology to another.
Below please find a summary of the updates in the new release.
- Blazor Server support
- New template to create Xomega Blazor solutions and projects.
- New package Xomega.Framework.Blazor that provides base views and components for Blazor server projects based on Xomega Framework.
- Generation of Blazor views from the Xomega model.
- Authentication and authorization support.
- Common enhancements
- Support for async operations with cancellation tokens on both the client and server sides.
- Upgrade to Entity Framework 6.4 to allow using it in .NET Core apps in addition to the Entity Framework Core.
- Generation of REST service clients in C# that allows multi-tier client apps to use ASP.NET Core REST services.
- Minimized custom code required to implement contextual lookup tables.
- Support for dynamic view titles with modification indicators in view models.
- Localization support for common messages.
- Using Xomega Framework 3.0.0 with support of the above features and other improvements and bug fixes.
- Using the latest versions of the NuGet packages.
- WPF enhancements
- Upgrade to use the latest cross-platform WPF on .NET Core 3.1
- Upgrade to support async operations to minimize UI freezing.
- Using REST services for multi-tier WPF apps now, with an option to still use legacy WCF services.
- Allowing to create a custom window for generated views.
- Project file for WPF projects upgraded to .NET Core format, allowing to not have to add generated files to them, and to customize file nesting rules.
- SPA enhancements
- Consuming REST services that use System.Text.Json for serialization.
- Upgrades to the TypeScript XomegaJS 3.0.0 framework to support new features in the Xomega Framework 3.0.0.
- WebForms enhancements
- Upgrade to support async pages and operations to improve scalability.
Since Visual Studio 2017 does not support .NET Core 3.1, all this functionality will be available only from VS 2019 and up, so we recommend that you upgrade to the latest version of Visual Studio.
As you may know, VS 2019 changed the way New Project dialog works, and shows a single searchable list of project and solution templates rather than an organized tree view. With the number of technologies Xomega supports and their combinations, there are currently 33 different Xomega project templates, which may be confusing to navigate. In a future release, we are planning to add a wizard that would help you pick the desired combination of technologies and features to build your solution.
We are also going to update the documentation, but most of the steps are either similar or the same as before. You can follow us on twitter to stay tuned with these updates. Also check out our updated
sample solution on github that demonstrates all the technologies and various Xomega features.
So go ahead and
install the new release to start with these new technologies now. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or issues with Xomega.