To formally recognize our migration from .NET 6 to .NET 7 we are pleased to announce the official release of Oqtane 4.0, an open source CMS and Application Framework for Blazor and .NET MAUI.
.NET 7 offers some massive performance gains as well as a ton of new capabilities for Blazor. In particular, Blazor Hybrid is now included by default with .NET MAUI and includes a streamlined method for setting up your environment to build native mobile and desktop apps using your existing web development skills. This is great news for Oqtane as it aligns perfectly with our goals to provide a modular framework where components can be re-used across all platforms and devices.
In order to keep pace and prepare for the upcoming migration to .NET 8 later this year, Oqtane is transitioning its development efforts effective immediately to .NET 7. And in alignment with our philosophy, there is a seamless upgrade path from Oqtane 3.x to 4.0 and Oqtane modules and themes that were created for 3.x will continue to function properly on 4.0 as the framework remains backward compatible.
Aside from the transition to .NET 7, Oqtane has been enhanced with many new features in this release. These include additional capabilities for both end users and developers. New capabilities for managing static resources such as stylesheets, JavaScript, meta tags, etc... were introduced. The framework was upgraded to Bootstrap 5.3. The server event pub/sub service was optimized and simplified. A new capability for Routable Modules was introduced for automating the creation of pages and modules during development and deployment. The default module and theme templates were upgraded to .NET 7/Bootstrap 5.3 and now include improved naming conventions as well as cross platform build support. User profile fields can now include custom validation via RegExp. The installer now allows you to choose a site template during installation. And of course in addition to all of these enhancements, many stabilization improvements were made to existing features and performance was improved in a variety of key areas.
To date, the open source project has recorded over 1600 pull requests from 44 contributors and has published 32 official releases, which ranks it among the most active open source projects within the .NET Foundation. The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of .NET developers.
*Note that .NET 7 was released in November 2022 and is a Short Term Support (STS) release of the .NET platform (ie. it will be supported for 18 months - until May 2024). The next official release of .NET will be .NET 8 in Q4 2023 and it will be a Long Term Support release (similar to .NET 6 which is currently supported until November 2024).