Sitefinity .NET 6 Renderer 2022 Updates & Features Coming in 2023

Learn how Sitefinity customers and partners can start new projects on .NET 6 and fully embrace new development and hosting options in 2022 and what’s coming in 2023.

Sitefinity .NET 6 renderer has been in GA since 14.1 and customers have started to adopt the new technology. We are seeing that every new customer is evaluating the .NET 6 option, and people are amazed at the development speed and the new WYSIWYG UX we provide in the page builder. In addition, many existing clients with projects on MVC and WebForms want to migrate to it.

Customers and partners want to start their new projects on .NET 6 and fully embrace the new development and hosting options. This way they can benefit not only from the development productivity but also all new features that come with .NET 6.

For those who want to migrate their existing projects, the new paradigm allows them to run their MVC and WebForms pages alongside .NET 6 pages. This makes the migration process gradual and allows them to jump on the new technology option with allocated resources right from the start, and without needing a heavy migration plan. At the same time, the dev team can develop on .NET 6 without spending time programming on the old technology, and they can be agile with the migration roadmap. This is important especially since WebForm has been deprecated but is still shipped within Sitefinity.

In the rest of the post, we will share some observations and try to answer some of the most frequent questions we've come across in the past months.

How to Kick-Start .NET 6

One trend that we are noticing is that people want to start coding from day one because they might already have experience with Sitefinity. While a few hours of trial and error can save you several minutes of looking at the documentation, please look at the following resources. They will give you a high level overview of the technology and at the same time detail how to setup and start coding.

• Sitefinity DX Foundation Course covers the .NET 6 topic in-depth, with several dedicated lessons on the architecture and more. The course is free of charge, and you can watch the videos at any time.
• The official documentation has all the necessary details and snippets.
• Quantum website has been redone to .NET 6, so you can look at something familiar. Grab the sample on GitHub and run it locally.
• There are tons of samples in GitHub that are covering different scenarios, like mega menu with personalization and others.
• All existing widgets are open source.

How to Use Blazor with Sitefinity .NET 6

Blazor server side is technology that clients are looking to complement with Sitefinity .NET 6. Here is a complete guide on how to use it, as well as a sample in GitHub. Progress offers the best suite of Blazor components and they can work alongside Sitefinity, especially when you try to build any of the applications—from smooth UX on public websites to complex portals where you want to visualize data through grids and charts.

Roadmap

Clients are also asking us what is coming next. This can be split into two parts: Features that we are extensively working on, and others that are on higher risk to be delivered, a.k.a. stretched effort. The two big ones are Section Presets and Classification widget.

The Section Presets is a functionality that allows you to save parts of your page and reuse them on other pages without having reference to the original (just a copy). Please watch the below video showing the wireframes (the feature is almost ready 😉):

The classification widget represents the categories and tags on the front end. With it, you would be able to filter the content list widget and navigate to a specific group of content types. For more details watch the short video below:

Trying to Deliver More Than Planned

There are three stretch items that we are working on: A breadcrumb widget, add facets in addition to our search capabilities and content recommendation widget.

So, let’s start with the breadcrumb navigation. This is a capability that one of our customers is applying to their .NET 6 implementation, and we decided to help them by productizing one of our samples and enhancing the navigation capability.

The other widget that we want to deliver is facets. Faceted navigation is used for self-directed drilldown filtering on query results in a search app, where your application offers form controls for scoping search to groups of documents (for example, categories or brands), and the search service provides the data structures and filters to back the experience.

The team is working on the content recommendation widget, which will feed the user with specific content. Needless to say, AI algorithms and Sitefinity Insight are involved, so all of this is smartly handled.

What is Coming After 14.3

Going beyond version 14.3, which is coming late in the fall, is something that we want to discuss with you—our clients and partners. Some of the feedback we are getting is around how to boost the productivity in the new page builder. There are nice suggestions, like a context menu for editing on the navigation tree. Another theme is around forms and features to enhance the current capabilities and surpass the MVC capabilities available today—like progressive profiling and integrating with business rule management to take care of complex logic and decision trees in the forms UI.

Don’t be a stranger—please ping me over LinkedIn or here in the comments. We will discuss how you can use Sitefinity .NET 6 and rely on future proof technology.

P.S.—Our plan is to stick to the latest version of the .NET framework and make sure we give you the option to fully utilize it. We have never been so excited about the future of Sitefinity.