We are two months away from our next major update (v20.1). The purpose of this post is to share our progress and give XAF users the opportunity to test new functionality before we wrap up our current dev cycle.
XAF is part of the Universal Subscription. Active Universal subscribers are entitled to download and install this Early Access Preview. If you currently own an active DXperience Subscription, you can test the features described herein by logging onto the DevExpress Download Manager and installing this build in trial mode. Once you do, please take a moment to tell us whether these new features address your business needs. This will help us fine-tune our code before official launch.
Early Access and CTP builds are provided solely for early testing purposes and are not ready for production use. This build can be installed side by side with other major versions of DevExpress products. Please backup your project and other important data before installing Early Access and CTP builds.
This EAP may not include all features/products we expect to ship in our v20.1 release cycle. As its name implies, the EAP offers an early preview of what we expect to ship in two months.
WinForms: Asynchronous Data Loading in List Views (CTP)
GridListEditor can load its data asynchronously in XPO-based apps when DataAccessMode = Client. The UI continues responding to user actions as data is being retrieved - you can cancel the load operation by closing the View or navigate to another View (in MDI mode). For more information, please refer to this KB article.
WinForms: Enhanced Filter Editor
XAF Grid, Tree and Pivot List Editors, Report and Dashboard designers now use an enhanced Filter Editor with a new display style, functions and skin support by default. For more information, please refer to this KB Article.
Blazor: XAF's Demo Update & Security System Tutorials
For those unfamiliar with XAF, but looking for security related functionality, our new Blazor Server demo and tutorial should be of help. This demo is based on XAF's user authentication and group authorization APIs for .NET Core and .NET Framework apps.
XAF's recent Blazor demo update included new themes, editors and many other enhancements - download the demo code here. Note that this EAP build does not include security or validation module support and has known issues.
This Early Access Preview adds a new Solution Wizard template to help you create and test XAF Blazor projects in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 or later. We made a separate wizard for Blazor (DevExpress v20.1 XAF.Blazor Solution Wizard) because it was easier for us to do this for this EAP. We hope to have the capability to create XAF projects sharing the same data model with WinForms and ASP.NET apps in the final release. Currently, you can either test XAF's Blazor UI with new projects or convert existing platform-agnostic modules to .NET Standard 2.0+ and add required data model classes manually. For more information, refer to the following documentation:
For more information on XAF's Blazor UI strategy, please refer to the 2020 roadmap.
Security System for Entity Framework Core (CTP)
Our goal is to help DevExpress and non-DevExpress customers benefit from XAF's Security System and Entity Framework Core. We added a secured Object Space for EF Core 3.1+ and demonstrated its use for basic CRUD operations in a Console Application. For more information on XAF's user authentication and group authorization APIs for .NET Core and .NET Framework apps, please refer to this GitHub repo.
Coming Soon: Model Editor for .NET Core and .NET Standard Projects
We hope to show a preview of the Model Editor for .NET Core 3+ WinForms (v20.1) and .NET Standard 2+ in the coming months. Technically, it is a standalone Model Editor tool that runs as a separate process and draws itself inside the Visual Studio frame. We took this approach so we could limit the impact of issues related to Component designer support in .NET Core projects and to have a full control over designer performance, stability, etc.
Breaking Changes
Before you migrate and test existing projects, we ask that you read XAF's breaking changes document.
Your Feedback Matters!
If you are using a trial version and are considering XAF for your next project, purchase a Universal subscription license for automatic access to this early access preview. If you are ready to upgrade to Universal from another subscription level, email us at
clientservices@devexpress.com for preferential upgrade pricing.
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