Strategically timed with the release of .NET 6 and .NET Conf 2021... we are pleased to announce the official release of Oqtane 3.0, an open source Modular Application Framework for Blazor.
For those of you who are not yet aware, .NET 6 is the latest iteration of the .NET Core platform. It is a Long Term Support (LTS) release which means that it will be fully supported by Microsoft for the next 3 years (.NET 5 support ends in June 2022). The .NET 6 release includes the latest improvements to the C# language (C# 10) and claims to be the fastest .NET yet, with massive gains in performance across a wide variety of workloads.
.NET 6 also provides a huge number of improvements for Blazor, the new framework which allows developers to create full stack web applications in C# with rich, interactive web UIs and scalable back-end services. Most notably, .NET 6 is the first LTS release for Blazor WebAssembly which should significantly accelerate its adoption in enterprise environments. The Blazor framework, community, and ecosystem continue to gain momentum and the future looks very bright with the ability to build hybrid apps with Blazor and .NET MAUI.
In order to keep pace and provide the optimal level of long term support, Oqtane is transitioning its development efforts effective immediately to .NET 6. And in alignment with our philosophy, you can rest assured that there is a seamless upgrade path from Oqtane 2.x to 3.0 and that Oqtane modules and themes that were created for 2.x will continue to function properly on 3.0 as the framework remains backward compatible.
Aside from the transition to .NET 6, Oqtane has also been enhanced to support multiple Blazor hosting models within the same deployment. This feature leverages the multi-tenant capabilities of the framework and allows you to specify your preferred pre-rendering and hosting model for each individual site in your installation.
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 1022 pull requests from 34 contributors and has published 15 official releases, which ranks it among the most active open source projects within the .NET Foundation. We also need to express our gratitude to the .NET Conf 2021 organizers for providing the opportunity to showcase the project in a session titled "Cross Platform Database Support on Overdrive".
The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of .NET developers. The 3.0.0 release is available for download on Github and we encourage the community to visit the repo often to keep abreast of the latest developments.