WebExpress 2.0.0‑alpha – The Halloween Release 🎃

The Ghosts of Legacy Code Are Gone

With the release of WebExpress 2.0.0-alpha, the project reaches a major milestone. This version marks the completion of a comprehensive modernization effort and provides the technical foundation for modern cloud, containerized, and enterprise applications. The primary focus was not the introduction of individual features, but the modernization of the platform as a whole.

Over recent development cycles, numerous components have been revised, technical debt has been reduced, and the architecture has been systematically unified. At the same time, security standards have been strengthened and key areas of the framework have been prepared for future requirements. The result is a modern, robust, and future-ready platform that provides developers and administrators with a reliable foundation for demanding applications.

A major focus of the work was the user interface. Existing dependencies on Bootstrap and Popper have been removed entirely. Instead, WebExpress now relies on modern web standards and native browser capabilities. Dialogs are based on the HTML5 dialog element, while dropdowns and popovers use the latest Popover API and CSS Anchor Positioning. This reduces technical complexity, improves performance, and enhances long-term maintainability.

One of the most significant changes is the WYSIWYG editor, which has been almost completely redesigned. The new state-driven architecture replaces the previous document.execCommand() based approach and clearly separates content from presentation. This enables more stable editing workflows, reliable undo and redo functionality, and significantly improved extensibility. In addition, numerous issues were resolved and features such as table editing, clipboard handling, drag and drop support, and ViewState integration were extensively modernized.

Security has also been significantly improved. Session management has been completely revised, known vulnerabilities have been eliminated, and security-related cookie settings have been hardened. WebExpress now enables important security mechanisms by default and provides stronger protection against common attack vectors such as Cross Site Scripting, Cross Site Request Forgery, and injection attacks.

With its new authentication architecture, WebExpress introduces a modern token-based identity model. Access and refresh tokens form the foundation for future authentication workflows, while a new identity layer unifies local user accounts and external identity providers within a common processing model. This greatly simplifies the future integration of solutions such as OpenID Connect and Keycloak. Personal Access Tokens have also been introduced for automation scenarios and technical integrations.

Configuration and infrastructure have likewise been modernized. The previous XML-based configuration has been replaced with a JSON-based structure and fully integrated into the standard .NET configuration model. In addition, the new CertificateManager provides centralized certificate management and already establishes the foundation for future capabilities such as automated certificate renewal and integration with external secret stores.

Alongside numerous improvements to workflow editors, forms, resource management, and ViewState handling, many issues across existing components have been resolved. Custom SVG icons reduce external dependencies, and the documentation has been significantly expanded. These improvements are complemented by new capabilities for cloud and container environments, including health checks, graceful shutdown support, and monitoring metrics.

From a quantitative perspective, WebExpress 2.0.0-alpha also represents a major development step. Compared to the previous version, approximately 45,500 additional lines of C# code and 28,200 additional lines of JavaScript have been added. At the same time, the documentation has been substantially expanded, and the architecture has grown by nearly 1,000 new classes.

WebExpress 2.0.0-alpha concludes the modernization effort that began with WebExpress 0.0.8-alpha. The framework now provides a modern and stable foundation for future development. As a result, upcoming work can focus more strongly on new features, integrations, and application scenarios. Developers, administrators, and interested users are invited to test the new version and share their experiences, feedback, and suggestions for improvement. Practical feedback helps guide future development and ensures that WebExpress continues to address the requirements of modern web applications. 🚀

Release notes:

Location: Cottbus, Deutschland

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