The main target of this release is the support of .Net Core, which allows you to use the latest, yet already quite mature Microsoft technologies, in order to quickly build high-performance cloud-enabled web applications in addition to the regular desktop apps.
Here is a summary of the new features in this release.
Support for Entity Framework Core.
You can now generate the entities and DB context classes either for the original EF 6.x or for the new EF Core, based on a flag set in the global entities configuration in the model. You can also generate extended partial classes for selected entities to add your custom code to.
ASP.NET Core REST Services.
The project for REST services has been updated to use ASP.NET Core 2.2 and EF Core instead of the older OWIN-based Web API package. This allows you to easily host your REST services on any machine as well as on the cloud.
To improve performance of the REST services, they now use asynchronous services by default, which helps them handle higher volumes of requests. You can still use traditional synchronous services though by setting the corresponding async parameter on the global services configuration in the model.
Updated Project Templates.
Project templates for creating new Xomega solutions or individual projects have been updated to use EF Core, but the legacy templates for EF 6.x are also available as an alternative.
All shared projects use the slim .Net Core format now, which makes them automatically pick up new changes after code generation without having to reload them.
Right after you add a new solution, you will be able to build it now without having to build the model project first.
And finally, all third party NuGet packages for the solution will be installed from the standard sources configured in your Visual Studio, such as nuget.org, instead of the local file system. This helped to cut the size of the installation download almost in half by not including any external packages.
For Visual Studio 2015 users
Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2015 does not support the latest .Net Core projects, nor is it likely to support them in the future, given the upcoming release of the VS 2019. Therefore, these new features will be only available for VS 2017 and up.
We did release a patch 6.8.1 for VS 2015 though, which contains some fixes for the previous release. Note that after we release a Xomega version for VS 2019, support for the VS 2015 version will be discontinued, so we recommend that you upgrade to the latest version of Visual Studio.
We hope that you’ll enjoy the new features once you go ahead and install the new release, but please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or issues.