Ext.NET 5.0 final released

Posted on by Geoffrey McGill in News

We are super thrilled to announce the official release of Ext.NET 5.0, which also includes the integration of Sencha Ext JS 7.0.

The highlights of Ext.NET 5.0 are reviewed below, but also check out our 5.0-preview announcement for additional details.

This is our first major version release since Ext.NET 4.0 was announced in April 2016.

Installation of Ext.NET 5.0 into a new or existing project takes just seconds and should be a near drop-in replacement for anyone upgrading an Ext.NET 4.x application.

Installation

As always, the new release can be installed from NuGet or download directly from the Ext.NET website.

WebForms

Install-Package Ext.NET

MVC

Install-Package Ext.NET.MVC

New Licensing

One of the most welcome new features of Ext.NET 5.0 is the return of the Single Developer licenses. The new license options provide flexibility for individual developers or teams of any size to build some amazing apps with Ext.NET.

Volume discounts are available for 3, 5 and 20+ developers. Check out the Pricing for full details.

New Material Theme

The new Material theme takes inspiration from the Android mobile operating system and introduces another user-friendly component style across your entire Ext.NET application.

Applying the Material theme to your application is as simple as setting a config option within your Web.config file or <ext:ResourceManager />.


// Web.config
<extnet theme=”Material” />

// ResourceManager
<ext:ResourceManager runat=”server” Theme=”Material” />

You can read more about the Material theme is our previous blog post where we introduced the theme.

Here’s a quick peek at the new theme…

Material theme with Form Fields
Form fields with and without values. View at Register Form.
Material theme with the Grid panel
Grid panel using the Material theme. View at Simple ArrayGrid.
Material theme with TabPanel
TabPanel component in Add Tab in TabPanel sample.
Material theme with Button
Clicking a Button with the Material theme.

If viewing within the Examples Explorer, be sure to switch the Theme to Material.

Upgrade to FontAwesome 5

All themes have been upgraded to FontAwesome 5. This brought in some minor visual changes and few nice updates to the icons. For instance, here is a comparison of the v4 and v5 Toolbar Icons:

material theme's button
Comparison between Ext.NET v4 and v5 glyphs. See the Component Overview in the Examples Explorer.

Breaking Changes

We’re taking the opportunity within this major version release to introduce some minor Break Changes, although almost all had been marked as [Obsolete] for the entirety of Ext.NET 4.x, so should have been long removed from your applications.

We made it our priority to comprehensively list all breaking changes by creating GitHub issues for each change and listing all within our CHANGELOG file. The CHANGELOG is available at several other locations, including:

  • Ext.NET NuGet package at App_Readme\Ext.NET\CHANGELOG.md
  • Root folder of the download .zip packages
  • Getting Started > Release Documents > CHANGELOG.md in the Examples Explorer
  • GitHub issues

Another change worth noting is the renaming of the Default theme to Classic. Tracked within GitHub in issue #1602, the theme had also been referred to as the Blue theme in the past.

Ext.NET fixes

There are a few Ext.NET specific fixes that made it into the 5.0 final release:

  • [#1643] Ext.form.field.Date fires select event twice – Fixed an issue with the DateField form component firing the Select event. The issue was introduced by a change from Ext JS 6.7 and also affected an extension we have for the component to limit for month selection only.
  • [#1678] Ext.grid.property.Grid always initializes with propertyNames set – At some point, an Ext.NET specific override forced setting as an empty array to avoid problems. Ext JS deprecated that feature and a warning was being thrown when the property grid was rendered running in ScriptMode=Debug.
  • [#1650] Layout issue with TextFields in Material theme if width is less than 150 pixels – The Material theme had an intrinsic CSS width limit on the text field that erroneously set the minimum width to 150px. A text field shorter than 150px would have display glitches, like crossing the boundaries of a panel or overlapping another component to the right of the text field.

The full list of fixes is available within our GitHub repository.

Goodbye Flash

Modern browsers have not supported Adobe Flash for some time, so with Ext.NET 5.0, it’s time to completely remove from the framework.

With this change, two components were sacrificed; MultiUpload and FlashComponent. The MultiUpload component has a feature-rich alternative with the FileUploadField and reproduces much of the same functionality. The FlashComponent was just an interface for Flash, so there is no point in keeping it around.

Your Feedback

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback from the Ext.NET 5 Preview release. We appreciate your help and everyone within the Ext.NET community benefits.

You can contact us anytime on Facebook, Twitter, or the Ext.NET Community Forums. We can also be reached by sending an email to hello@object.net.

If you have technical support questions, the best way to get in touch is by posting your questions to the Ext.NET Community Forums. The forums are an excellent knowledge base containing 10+ years of conversations grouped by Ext.NET version. Posting your questions in the public forum ensures other community members can participate and benefit from the discussion in the future.

Thanks everyone!