NE.Standard.UI.Web.Renderers 1.0.0-rc.2

NE.Standard

A server-driven UI framework for .NET.

You write a view — a component tree, in C# fluent builders — and a controller — an observable object graph. The framework compiles that pair once into an immutable, indexed description, renders it to a platform, and then keeps the rendered surface in sync with the controller in both directions. The client never holds application state and never decides what to draw.

Web is the platform implemented today: ASP.NET Core for the shell and the transport, SignalR for the live channel, and a TypeScript client that ships embedded in the assembly — there is no separate front-end deploy step.

Documentation: akievansdev.github.io/NE.Standard.

Install

This is a pre-release. Every package goes out on one repository version and they are only ever installed at matching versions, so --prerelease is needed until the first stable release.

dotnet add package NE.Standard.UI.Web --prerelease
dotnet add package NE.Standard.UI.Web.Renderers --prerelease

Everything else in the framework arrives as a dependency of those two.

Icons ship separately, from NE.Standard.UI.Icons — Lucide and Material Symbols, a name package and a web package each, MIT, on their own version. They are developed alongside the framework, so a set and the renderer it plugs into are never out of step. The demo uses the Material set.

Components can ship separately too. NE.Standard.UI.CodeInput is the first: a code editor with syntax highlighting, line numbers and find and replace, under the framework's own licence and on its own version. A component package is a component like the built-in ones — the same generator, the same binding, its own renderer against NE.Standard.UI.Web.Abstractions.

The colour palette is NE.Colors, a repository of its own because more than this framework needs it. It is MIT, and it arrives as a dependency of NE.Standard.UI.Abstractions.

If you installed the package NE.Standard — the general-purpose helpers that used to ship from here — it is NE.Common now, MIT and in its own repository. It was never part of the framework, and nothing here depends on it.

A first look

A view declares the tree and what each part binds to:

internal sealed class CounterView : UIViewBase, IUIViewDefinition
{
    public static string ViewKey => "counter";

    protected override IVisualComponent CreateContent()
        => new ContainerComponent()
            .SetPadding(new UIThickness(16))
            .AddChild(new TextComponent()
                .BindTitle(nameof(CounterController.Count))
                .SetPlacement(1, 1, 24, 1)
            )
            .AddChild(new ButtonComponent()
                .OnClick(nameof(CounterController.Increment))
                .ConfigureDefaultContent(c => c.SetTitle("Add one"))
                .SetPlacement(1, 2, 24, 1)
            );
}

A controller holds the state, and changing it is what updates the screen — [RecursiveMember] generates the notifying setter and the path segment the binding resolves against:

internal sealed partial class CounterController : UIControllerBase
{
    [RecursiveMember]
    public partial int Count { get; set; }

    [UICommand]
    public void Increment() => Count++;
}

Hosting is an ASP.NET Core application:

WebApplicationBuilder builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

WebStartupBuilder.Configure<AppWebStartup, AppStartup>(builder.Services);

WebApplication app = builder.Build();
await app.MapStandardUIWebAsync();
await app.RunAsync();

The demo

examples/DemoApp is the reference application: every built-in component has its pages, 106 routes in all. The demo's sign-in and authorization pages are being rebuilt and are not in it at the moment; the mechanism they showed is exercised by examples/TeamRoom, the mini application. Every component has a Main page — a preview beside every bindable property, each row stepping its value — plus, where they earn their keep, an Examples page for variants worth putting side by side and a Scenarios page for what needs a story rather than a property.

dotnet run --project examples/DemoApp.Web    # http://localhost:5000

Building

Requires the .NET 10 SDK, and Node for the TypeScript client — which builds as part of dotnet build, so a TypeScript type error fails the .NET build.

dotnet build
dotnet build -p:SkipWebClientBuild=true      # skip npm/vite when node is unavailable

Contributing

This repository is a read-only mirror of a private one, so a merged pull request here would be erased by the next release — pull requests are switched off. Please open an issue instead: the change is made upstream and appears here with the next release.

License

The Prosperity Public License 3.0.0 — free for noncommercial use, with a thirty-day trial for commercial use. Personal projects, research, education, charities and public institutions are not commercial use. See LICENSE.md; it is one page.