WebForms Core 2.2 Development Has Begun

WebForms Core 2.2 is a new development in server-orchestrated UI, a departure from traditional server-driven approaches like Blazor Server. Instead of maintaining a stateful server-side component tree, WebForms Core 2.2 focuses on server-defined UI structure that is executed by WebFormsJS in the browser. This creates a clean separation between server-defined UI and client-side DOM execution.

The 2.2 version of WebForms Core aims to elevate the server-orchestrated UI model by providing better rendering, state management, data transformation, and extensibility. It does this by increasing the expressiveness of WebForms commands, moving away from the need for developers to construct every transformation from small DOM commands.

One of the key features of WebForms Core 2.2 is Isole, a high-level abstraction for working with the Transient DOM. Isole automatically manages the initialization and completion of transient DOM operations, simplifying the process of isolating complex groups of DOM transformations.

Rendering and state management are central to WebForms Core 2.2. Complex UI updates often involve multiple transformations, temporary states, and state detection. WebForms Core 2.2 introduces mechanisms that allow these operations to be treated as part of a larger rendering process, with snapshot and rollback capabilities for preserving and restoring the HTML state of an element.

GetTagHash, a new operation in WebForms Core 2.2, generates a hash from the HTML representation of a tag. This hash can be used to determine whether the HTML state has changed, providing a lightweight mechanism for state validation, conditional rendering, optimization, and future rendering mechanisms.

WebForms Core 2.2 also includes formatting operations for cached and saved values, arithmetic operations for performing calculations directly on values used by WebForms commands, and hashing operations for detecting UI state changes without maintaining a mirror of the browser DOM. These features allow WebForms Core 2.2 to provide a more expressive and efficient server-orchestrated UI model.