I’m a big fan of static site renderers, and they are still one of the missing elements that would make ASP.NET Core more compelling for users across the vast ecosystem divide. In the meantime, developers must rely on tools like Astro, Jekyll, and 11ty to build static site experiences. Recently, I read about Astro 5.0 and its server island implementation. Server islands allow for mostly static pages to carve out portions of the page that will be rendered on-demand by, you guessed it, the server. This allows site authors to deliver fast, statically rendered pages that benefit the user while allowing for dynamic user-specific content.
In this post, we’ll see how to implement a similar island approach in ASP.NET Core applications that utilize response and output caching for performance increases while still carving out small page sections for dynamic content. We’ll use Htmx to trigger requests for dynamic content based on three exclusive page events.
