A Quick Start With Blazor Apps

We have developed many Single Page Applications using Angular, Aurelia, React, etc. Finally Microsoft has introduced Blazor Apps, a programming framework to build client side rich web applications with dotnet using C#. What ? Is it possible to create a Single Page Application using C# without using JavaScript ? Yes, we can create a rich interactive User Interface ( UIs ) using C# instead of JavaScript and also the client and server code logic has been written in the app using .Net. So as a dotnet developer we can develop a Single Page Application ( SPA ) using Microsoft C#.

Blazor app has five different editions and two are now available in Visual Studio, and three editions are in the planing stage.

• Blazor WebAssembly
• Blazor Server
• Blazor Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
• Blazor Hybrid
• Blazor Native

The following are the currently available Blazor apps.

Blazor WebAssembly is a single-page app framework for building interactive client-side web apps with .NET ( dotnet ). Blazor is running client-side in the browser on WebAssembly and the client side code has been written in C# instead of using Javascript. So the .Net code is running inside the browser with the help of Webassembly(abbreviated wasm). Yes , it will work with all the modern web browsers, including mobile browsers. There's no .NET server-side dependency but the app is fully functional after downloading the .Net runtime to the client. This will create a client-side dependency and serverless deployment scenarios are possible because ASP.NET Core web server isn't required to host the app.

As per the Microsoft information "Blazor WebAssembly" is still in preview and expected to go live by May 2020. So it is clear that Blazor WebAssembly is not ready for the production use and is currently in a development stage. If you’re looking for a production solution, then you can choose "Blazor Server" and it is recommended by Microsoft.

Blazor Server provides support for hosting Razor components on the server in an ASP.NET Core app; that means Blazor can run your client logic on the server. The UI updates, event handling, and JavaScript calls are handled over with the help of "SignalR" ( a real-time messaging framework. ) connection. The download size is smaller than Blazor Server compared to Blazor WebAssembly app because those are handling in server side and the app loads much faster. Serverless deployment is not possible because an ASP.NET Core server is required to serve the app.