Blazor – Building client web apps with C#

With the release of .NET Core 3.0 in late September came the first official production release of Blazor Server Apps.

Blazor is a Microsoft framework for building interactive web user interfaces with .NET which means as a .NET developer we can skills we already know to develop Single Page Applications (SPA) without having to use frameworks such as React or Angular and more importantly we can write code that runs in the browser and/or server in C# instead of JavaScript all without having to use browser plugin’s.

Blazor comes in two different flavors.
The first flavor (and what is currently available for production use) is Blazor Server where your app runs on your webserver and the client can be extremely thin and only needs to present the server rendered HTML with all of the processing happening behind the scenes on the server side with only the HTML DOM changes being pushed down the wire so the client browser can make any required page updates.

The second flavor is Blazor Client App (not currently available for production use but will be coming soon) where your C# code and HTML code all run directly in the client Browser and the web pages can be served as static pages with all data interaction happening via web services if required.

For this meetup we will be primarily focusing on Blazor Server Apps but will touch on both models so you have a good understanding of the differences.

This talk should be of particular interest for traditional Web Forms developers. As you are probably aware with the last release of the Full .NET Framework version 4.8, in April 2019, Microsoft announced that v4.8 will be the last major release of the full .NET Framework and that they will no longer be putting new development efforts in to the Full .NET Framework. Only bug fixes and patches.

Since, Web Forms only runs on the Full .NET Framework and not .NET Core, Web Forms developers can still continue to develop using Web Forms as it will still be supported for the foreseeable future (minimum 10 years), is not probably not prudent to start new projects in Web Forms.

With that fact in mind, Microsoft is positioning Blazor as the future while at the same time, the natural development path for Web Forms developers so you can continue to utilize many of the same skills you already have.

Come join us on February 25th as Larry Fura presents and see what all the excitement is about.