We are happy to announce the release of WebSharper 4.5!

Install templates for .NET Core SDK: dotnet new -i WebSharper.Templates::4.5.0.265

Download templates for Visual Studio 2017: http://websharper.com/installers/WebSharper.4.5.0.265.vsix

The main highlight is a simplification of the HTML construction functions: div, span, p, etc. Until now, these functions returned type Elt, a subtype of the more general Doc. This often required upcasts to Doc, for example:

if someCondition then
    Doc.Empty
else
    div [] [text "test"] :> Doc

These functions now return type Doc, which means that the above can now be written as:

if someCondition then
    Doc.Empty
else
    div [] [text "test"]

If you do need to use the Elt API on an element, such as .Dom to retrieve the underlying DOM element, you can create it with eg. Elt.div, which returns Elt like div used to.

Full change list:

WebSharper

Features

• #1001: Strongly-name the .NET Standard core libraries.
• #1002: Added --jsoutput and --minjsoutput command line options, as well as WebSharperJsOutput and WebSharperMinJsOutput project properties, as equivalents to jsOutput and minJsOutput wsconfig.json options.

Fixes

• #1000: Compiling in BundleOnly mode correctly detects compile errors.

WebSharper UI

Features and breaking changes

• #183: [F#] In order to minimize the number of upcasts needed in user code, the following functions now return values of type Doc instead of Elt:

  • Functions in the module WebSharper.UI.Html, such as div, span, etc.
  • Functions in the module WebSharper.UI.Html.Tags, such as option, object, etc.
  • Functions in the module WebSharper.UI.Html.SvgElements, such as g, rect, etc.
  • Functions in the module WebSharper.UI.Client.Doc, such as Input, Button, etc.

  For users who do need values of type Elt, the following were added:

  • A new module WebSharper.UI.Html.Elt, containing Elt-returning equivalents to the functions in WebSharper.UI.Html and WebSharper.UI.Html.Tags.
  • A new module WebSharper.UI.Html.SvgElements.Elt, containing Elt-returning equivalents to the functions in WebSharper.UI.Html.SvgElements.
  • A new module WebSharper.UI.Client.Elt, containing Elt-returning equivalents to the functions in WebSharper.UI.Client.Doc.

Fixes

• #112: Pass the correct Dom.Element as argument to an .OnAfterRender() called on a template's .Elt().
• #185: Fix setting the class of an SVG element.

Happy coding!