The release of Oqtane 3.2 a month ago represented a significant milestone for the platform, as it introduced some powerful new multi-platform capabilities based on .NET MAUI and Blazor Hybrid as well as significant performance enhancements.
The 3.2.1 release is primarily focused on stabilization. This includes performance improvements to the client startup logic for Blazor Hybrid and Blazor WebAssembly, improvements to base url handling and static resources for component resusability in .NET MAUI, support for Roles as part of OpenID Connect integrations, as well as a new capability to capture server-side events in your custom code.
Blazor Server uses SignalR to maintain a persistent connection between the client and server. However in order to preserve server resources, SignalR will disconnect the connection after a period of idle user activity. This results in a message being displayed to the user once they become active again of "Could not reconnect to the server. Reload the page to restore functionality.". This is not an optimal user experience, so in Oqtane 3.2.1 some logic was added to enable the client browser to automatically reconnect to the server when this scenario is encountered.
The Oqtane Philosophy highlights "Minimizing Dependencies" as one of overarching principles for the framework which basically means choosing dependencies wisely and only including components which are widely used and consistently maintained. Recently a high security issue was identified in the very popular Json.NET (Newtonsoft.Json) library. Oqtane had already transitioned to the newer System.Text.Json native platform library and was only using Json.NET for some very specific scenarios. These scenarios were refactored in 3.2.1 and the Json.NET dependency has now been completely removed.
This release includes 21 pull requests by 4 different contributors, pushing the total number of project commits all-time to 3093. The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of .NET developers. The 3.2.1 release is available for download on Github and is running in production at https://www.oqtane.org and https://www.blazorcms.net.