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What's New in 4.1

Wisej.NET 4.1 builds on the 4.0 foundation — the .NET Core designer, managed graphics and the SDK project format are unchanged — and adds a layer on top of it: accessibility built into every control, a family of Fluent Design themes and icon packs, Lucide icons, a new ChartJS4 extension for Chart.js 4, a Mermaid extension for text-defined diagrams, and a Dashboard control for Technology Partners.

For most projects, moving from 4.0 to 4.1 is a package update. The one breaking change is the removal of AccessibleRole, described under Upgrading from 4.0 below.

Getting Started​

Wisej.NET 4.1 is available on NuGet as the Wisej-4 package. Update the package reference in your project, rebuild, and reopen the designer.

<PackageReference Include="Wisej-4" Version="4.1.*" />

The Visual Studio designer and the project templates are a VSIX downloaded from wisej.com/builds — Wisej.NET is no longer published on the Visual Studio Marketplace — as described in Getting Started.

Accessibility​

Wisej.NET controls now emit semantic ARIA roles, accessible names and descriptions, and state attributes — aria-checked, aria-selected, aria-expanded, aria-disabled, aria-valuenow and the rest — that screen readers, browser automation and accessibility-tree inspection tools can consume. The role is decided by the control: a Button is a button, a TabControl is a tablist of tabs, a DataGridView is a grid. Your code keeps using the familiar .NET properties — AccessibleName, AccessibleDescription, Text, Enabled, Checked — and Wisej.NET renders the matching attributes on the element the user actually interacts with.

The same information makes Wisej.NET applications easier to drive with tools such as Playwright: getByRole("button", { name: "Save" }) instead of a generated element id.

Accessibility

Fluent Themes and Icons​

Four new built-in themes — FluentLight-5 and FluentDark-5, based on the Microsoft Fluent Design System, and Material-4 and MaterialDark-4, a refresh of the Material theme — join the existing built-in themes. Each comes in a light and a dark variant, can be switched at run time, and can be extended with the Theme Builder or a JSON mixin like any other theme.

Two new icon packs, FluentUI Filled and FluentUI Outlined, add the Fluent icon set to the icon packs that ship as NuGet packages.

Fluent Themes and Icons

Lucide Icons​

Lucide, the open-source successor to Feather Icons, is available as a Wisej.NET icon pack: a large set of minimal, line-based SVG icons that share one stroke width and one visual language, and can be recolored and resized from the theme.

Lucide Icons

ChartJS4 Integration​

ChartJS4 is a new extension for Chart.js 4.x, built alongside the existing ChartJS and ChartJS3 extensions rather than replacing them. It has a strongly typed options model for every scale, axis, plugin and dataset type, an ExtensionData dictionary on every options class that passes any Chart.js option — including third-party plugin options — straight through, server-defined JavaScript functions for scriptable options such as per-point colors, automatic discovery of Chart.js plugins embedded in your assemblies, and the Chart.js runtime API (UpdateData, Hide, Show, GetImageAsync, …) exposed as C# methods.

ChartJS4 Integration

The full reference is in the Extensions API: Wisej.Web.Ext.ChartJS4 and Wisej.Web.Ext.ChartJS4.Models.

Mermaid Extension​

The Mermaid extension renders a Mermaid text definition — a flowchart, a sequence diagram, a Gantt chart, a class or state diagram — as an SVG diagram inside a Wisej.NET page. Because the source is plain text, diagrams can be generated from application data and kept in source control like code.

Mermaid Extension

The manual page is Mermaid in the Extensions section, and the reference is Wisej.Web.Ext.Mermaid.

Dashboard Control​

The Dashboard control is a framework for composing interactive, data-driven dashboards from a toolbox of widgets: a drag-and-drop layout engine on the client, an extensible widget model on the server, and data integration that is agnostic to the source — REST, WebSockets, timers or plain .NET events.

It is available to Technology Partners only.

Dashboard Control

Upgrading from 4.0​

  • AccessibleRole is gone. The AccessibleRole property and the Wisej.Web.AccessibleRole enumeration were removed. The role a control exposes is now determined by the control itself and cannot be overridden. Code that set AccessibleRole no longer compiles; delete the assignment. AccessibleName and AccessibleDescription are unchanged and remain the way to give a control custom accessible text.
  • The new icon packs replace the SVG renderer. Referencing the FluentUI or Lucide icon pack switches the whole application to an updated SVG rendering pipeline. The existing icon packs and theme icons keep working, but check custom SVG icons after adding one of the new packs.
  • Nothing else changes. Project files, .resx resources and designer files written for 4.0 open unchanged in 4.1.

If you are coming from 3.x, follow the 4.0 release notes first — the .NET Core designer and managed graphics changes there are the ones that touch project files:

Upgrade from 3.x

Earlier Releases​

Release notes for every version back to 2.0 are collected under Releases.