Ext.NET 4 Preview Now Available

We’re super excited to announce the immediate availability of Ext.NET 4 Preview!

This release includes many new features and improvements and of course one of the biggest changes includes the upgrade to Sencha Ext JS 6.

Installation options for Ext.NET 4 are available from ext.net/download, or install using NuGet:

Ext.NET WebForms

Install-Package Ext.NET -pre

Ext.NET MVC

Install-Package Ext.NET.MVC -pre

The -pre switch is required because this is prerelease version. Over the coming two months we are scheduled to release at least three more versions before the final release at the end of March 2016.

Why a Preview?

We’re still early in the Ext.NET 4 life cycle, and the current state does not include many of the cool new features that will be available before the final release.

The primary goal of this preview release was to ensure backwards compatibility by providing a drop-in upgrade replacement for Ext.NET 3 applications. There were a few Breaking Changes introduced by Sencha in Ext JS 6, although mostly just renaming of a few properties. A simple Search & Replace can easily find and fix. Please see the CHANGELOG for details.

What’s Included?

The big new feature is Ext JS 6, including a number of enhancements, especially in the areas of Accessibility, Charts, and Grid.

Ext JS 6.0 Release Notes

What’s Not Included?

While Ext JS 6 unified much of the Ext JS 5 and Sencha Touch mobile frameworks, currently Ext.NET 4 does not support the mobile API. The two frameworks (desktop vs mobile) are still very unique and will require a separate release. We’ll have more to say about this soon.

The powerful new Ext.NET Spreadsheet component will be available in the upcoming Ext.NET 4 Beta release.

Upgrading

We’ve designed Ext.NET 4 to be a drop-in replacement for Ext.NET 3 applications.

If you’re using NuGet, just run the following command. That’s it. Or, browse to Ext.NET using the NuGet Package Manager, but be sure to check the Include prerelease checkbox.

Update-Package Ext.NET -pre

Triton Theme

The Examples Explorer and MVC Examples Explorer have been upgraded to Ext.NET 4 with a fresh new look from the Triton theme and FontAwesome fonts.

From the Ext JS 6.0 release notes:

Central to this release is our latest theme named Triton. Triton is a flat, minimalistic theme that puts the focus on your content and not on decorations like rounded corners or gradients. The Triton theme is the first Ext JS theme to provide comprehensive support for “font icons”. Many of the icons used in Triton are from Font Awesome with some useful additions to complete the ensemble. Using Triton, applications can easily control the size and color of these scalable, vector images.

Support for font icons includes such items as panel tools, tree icons, form field triggers, button arrows, checkboxes, radio buttons, grid action icons, grid column and filter menus, slider thumbs, box and border splitters, toolbar overflow indicators … and more. Pretty much all visual elements can use font icons.

3D Pie Charts

Among the many new Chart features and improvements, a big one is the new 3D Pie Charts. Support for labels, legend, highlighting, tooltips, bevels have improved with shading and configurable 3D effects.

Browser Support

As with all previous releases of Ext.NET, browser support goes deep. Internet Explorer 8 support remains, as well as all new versions of modern browsers for the desktop.

Platform	Browser
Desktop	IE8+ (Strict DOCTYPE)
	Microsoft Edge (Latest 2 Versions)
	Firefox (Latest 2 Versions)
	Chrome (Latest 2 Versions)
	Opera (Latest 2 Versions)
	Safari 7+

Ext.NET 3 introduced Tablet support, and Ext.NET 4 continues with enhanced functionality, testing and browser support.

Platform	Browser
Tablet	Safari 7+ (iPad)
	Android 4.0+ Chrome
	Android 4.4+ Native
	Windows 8 Touch Screen – IE10+

GitHub

As of Ext.NET 4, we’ve moved our source code from SVN to git, hosted on GitHub.

For several years we’ve used GitHub for public Issue tracking, and now we’ve moved all source hosting onto the platform.

All new source code commits will be sent to GitHub, although any commits made to previous releases (Ext.NET 3, 2 & 1) will still be mirrored in SVN. This is an automated process.

Ext.NET 4 commits are only available in GitHub to Ext.NET Enterprise Premium Support members.

Your existing SVN accounts will continue to function without interruption. All new Ext.NET Enterprise purchases will only require access to GitHub.

Unfortunately we cannot provide source code access to non Ext.NET 4 Enterprise members. Upgrading to Ext.NET Enterprise will get you access to the Ext.NET Premium GitHub repository, an Ext.NET 4 Enterprise license for your team, and all minor version upgrades of Ext.NET 4.

GitHub Examples Explorers

In addition to moving all Ext.NET development and Issue tracking into GitHub, we’ve also released both the WebForms Examples Explorer and MVC Examples Explorer into their own public GitHub repositories.

The source code for both Examples Explorers have been officially released as open source projects with the very liberal Apache 2.0 license applied.

• WebForms Examples Explorer source code
• MVC Examples Explorer source code

Getting the Examples Explorers running locally is very simple. Clone the repository locally, then double click the .sln file. Visual Studio should take care of the rest. A .zip download of the source is also available directly from GitHub.

Your Feedback

We need your help and feedback to improve Ext.NET 4.

Big investments are being made into the continued development and long term future of Ext.NET, and we need your input. Please feel free to contact us at hello@ext.net if you have any questions or comments, or join the conversations happening within the Ext.NET Community forums at forums.ext.net.

Technical support questions are best asked in the forums. The public discussion may help others in the future, and allow the community to participate.

For existing Ext.NET 3 application developers, try upgrading one of your apps to Ext.NET 4, and let us know how it goes. We’re very interested in any issues you might run into. These could likely be fixed before the Ext.NET 4 Beta release.