Sitefinity DX & .NET Core: Next Generation Cross Platform Development

The .NET Core renderer in Sitefinity DX is a stand-alone .NET Core application that can be deployed and hosted anywhere. You can bring your IDE of choice and code against it. When developing new features and functionality, you work on the presentation layer of Sitefinity only, which lets you iterate at a higher speed. The build and deployment time is markedly shorter.  

The Renderer app communicates with your Sitefinity application through a set of APIs. via the C# RestSdk package (Progress.Sitefintiy.RestSdk). This minimizes the margin of error and reduces the risk of vulnerabilities in frontend development. Additional API endpoints can be exposed from Sitefinity CMS to cover custom use cases. 

The development model employs the same concepts of widget, widget designers and template development as MVC. With the .NET Core renderer, we are leveraging view components, layout files and predefined building blocks, allowing no-code widget configuration. The extensive product documentation contains many sample widgets demonstrating the development model. 

Since the backend and the frontend are decoupled, you will need to host two applications: one for the backend and one for the frontend. This sort of separation of concerns allows greater scalability and faster iterations at the frontend.

We are supporting the latest version, .NET 6, and our plan is to always keep up with the framework’s upgrade cycle. 

.NET Core follows the latest programming patterns and allows us to deliver features quite fast—developing new widgets is a prime example. The .NET Core renderer is not coupled with an old technology stack and will boost your developer productivity. At the same time, it has introduced a full WYSIWYG page and form building experience for content editors.

We strongly recommend that you carefully evaluate .NET Core and its features since it has many superior capabilities compared to MVC. This way, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about which technology better matches your requirements. Although the total number of OOB widgets for MVC is higher at first glance, many widgets in .NET Core are folded into one (e.g., ContentList vs stand-alone News and Blogs widgets).  Besides , with the new widget designers, you can quickly create custom widgets. 

Yes, it is perfectly OK to use your existing MVC pages with .NET Core. In this case, the .NET Core renderer will act as a proxy and serve the MVC pages to the client, so you can have MVC and .NET Core pages within the same project trouble-free. This approach is especially helpful when trying to migrate existing projects to .NET Core. 

As for mixing different types of widgets, you cannot place your existing MVC or WebForms widgets on a.NET Core page or template. Only .NET Core widgets can exist on .NET Core pages. Keep in mind that the paradigms of MVC and ViewComponents are similar enough for some code to be reused. 

The widgets are open sourced and available in GitHub. You can customize and extend them to fit your specific use case.

The .NET Core Renderer does not limit you to working with .NET Core pages only. Using the Renderer, you can simultaneously work with .NET Core and MVC pages and maintain websites with a mixed collection of rendering solutions. This way, you can migrate your current website page by page. 

For more information, see Migrate Pages to .NET Core. You’re welcome to also review the complete Sitefinity .NET Core Renderer product documentation.