News

'Alternative to Blazor' Wisej 3 Ships

• By David Ramel
• 04/21/2022

Wisej 3 has shipped, described as an "alternative for Blazor developers" for building enterprise-level ASP.NET web applications with specialized Visual Studio templates.

Running on .NET 6 on Windows, Linux and macOS, the third edition of framework from IceTeaGroup, a global development consulting company, comes in a free community version for small businesses and independent developers, along with for-pay licenses and a free trial.

"IceTeaGroup provides a solid and proven alternative for Blazor developers looking to build real-life complex enterprise-level web applications," the company said in an April 20 news release. "Wisej's pixel-perfect designer helps developers build complex views and integrate features like drag-and-drop, customizable themes, complex layouts, modal workflows and more."

The offering comes with a suite of more than 100 controls, along with control sets for popular third-party offerings from Syncfusion, DevExpress, Telerik and others.

While it primarily targets web applications, integrations for mobile development are also provided. Those web applications, however, aren't ordinary web sites, as Wisej is described a highly specialized framework for Real Time Web Applications. A main selling point of the framework is that developers don't have to dive deep into HTML, CSS or JavaScript and wrestle with state management, backend services, callbacks, Ajax panels, synchronization, DOM, security, authentication, concurrency and so on. Microsoft's Blazor, to which the product is compared, is known for providing a C#-based experience instead of primarily using JavaScript code in web-dev projects.

A 2020 CodeProject article written by Microsoft's Jeremy Likness says "Wisej is a powerful platform that abstracts away the nuances of client/server interactions while embracing all the web has to offer, including third-party HTML5-based solutions, it is the perfect tool for building enterprise web applications."

IceTeaGroup provides downloads of templates to be used in Visual Studio 2022 and 2019 editions. SharpDevelop, a discontinued, free and lightweight alternative to Visual Studio, can also be used.

The main highlight of the v3 release is that it's the first one to support both the old .NET Framework (v4.8) and .NET Core (which became .NET 6, .NET 7 and so on) while running on the three major OSes. Thus, while much of the development effort for Wisej 3 involved splitting the code between .NET Core and .NET Framework and replacing all of the ASP.NET code with ASP.NET Core code, some new features have also been added. Some of these include download callbacks, auto layout functionality, new interfaces and a new experimental feature to extend the current data binding model to make it compatible with the Commanding approach found in .NET MAUI (evolution of Xamarin.Forms with desktop support added).

Going forward, the company said it will tackle embedded systems development, planning a 2022 build optimized for devices with processor and memory constraints, typically used in Internet of Things (IoT), programmable logic controller (PLC), home automation and similar projects.

After that, a Wisej Designer for .NET 6 is on tap, which the company said will pave the way for Wisej to become platform-independent at design time. Currently, the designer doesn't work for .NET 6 single-target projects, as it's tied to the old .NET Framework. Those plans are in the early stages, though, so nothing is guaranteed.