Strategically timed with the release of .NET Conf 2020 and .NET 5... we are pleased to announce the official release of Oqtane 2.0, an open source Modular Application Framework for Blazor.
For those of you who are not yet aware, .NET 5 is the next iteration of .NET Core. It represents the first release in Microsoft 's .NET unification journey which aims to produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere with uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences. Integrating the best capabilities of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono, .NET 5 is Microsoft 's path to the future.
One of the focus areas for .NET 5 is to enable developers to rapidly create powerful applications for the modern web. Blazor allows developers to create full stack web applications in C# with rich, interactive web UIs and scalable back-end services. .NET 5 continues the evolution of Blazor with some powerful new capabilities targeted at both Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly. In particular, .NET 5 delivers significant performance improvements in Blazor component rendering and JSON serialization - resulting in a 2-3X improvement for most scenarios.
This is all good news for Oqtane. In fact, we are so confident in .NET 5, we are transitioning all of our future development efforts to this new platform effective immediately. And you can rest assured that Oqtane extensions for 1.x which were built on .NET Core 3.1 will continue to function properly as the new releases are backward compatible.
Aside from the transition to .NET 5, Oqtane has also been enhanced to include localization support. I would like to publicly thank Hisham Bin Ateya (@hishamco) for his efforts in bringing this powerful new capability to Oqtane. Localization is available for the core framework as well as modules and themes, and can be used when running on Blazor Server or Blazor WebAssembly. Localization support is essential in creating web UIs which users can interact with in their native language, which now makes Oqtane a more viable option for application developers worldwide. Oqtane migrated to Github Discussions and also added a documentation site during this release cycle, which is fully automated using DocFX to produce updated API documentation. I would like to thank Daniel Mettler (@iJungleboy) for his expertise and guidance in making this happen.
Since the official 1.0 release in May 2020, the Oqtane community has continued to grow and expand. To date, the open source repository has attracted 568 pull requests from 21 contributors and has published 6 official releases, which ranks it among the most active open source projects within the .NET Foundation. We also need to recognize the expert assistance and encouragement we have received directly from members of the Microsoft ASP.NET team including Daniel Roth, Steve Sanderson, Pranav Krishnamoorthy, and Safia Abdalla. We are also grateful to the .NET Conf organizers for providing the opportunity to showcase the project in a session titled "Trailblazor: Creating Dynamic Applications on Blazor".
The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of .NET developers. The 2.0.0 release is available for download on Github and I encourage the community to visit the repo often to keep abreast of the latest developments.