Ever since it was first announced as an experimental project in late 2017, there’s been plenty of excitement about Blazor. The promise is huge — to let developers write C# code that runs on a streamlined version of .NET in the browser. It’s the biggest expansion of .NET’s front-end footprint since Silverlight died in 2012. And unlike Silverlight, Blazor works natively, which means there’s no plugins, setup issues, or security vulnerabilities.
But despite all the excitement, plenty of cautious developers have given Blazor a wide berth. Some didn’t want to commit to technology that might end up in the towering pile of abandoned tech that Microsoft’s built over the years. But most developers just didn’t want to waste time learning APIs that were still evolving.
Now that’s changed. At the Build 2020 conference, Microsoft announced Blazor WebAssembly’s official first release (technically version 3.2.0, for historical reasons). Even if you love it, you’ll probably still want to hold off on adoption until the release of .NET 5 later this year, when Blazor gets an update and LTS (long-term support) status. But if you’re interested in Blazor’s potential and considering using it in the future, now is a great time to start experimenting.
There are plenty of ways to learn about a new technology, from Microsoft’s own documents (solid, but dry) to full books and video courses on the subject. My favorite approach is to learn the fundamentals about how Blazor works, and then start playing with sample code. And thanks to sky-high community excitement and its long public preview, Blazor has a huge number of sample projects.
To help you out, I’ve gathered a few of my favorites. This isn’t a comprehensive list, just a selection of some of my favorite Blazor examples for starting out.
How to use these examples:_ I’ve run all of the following projects with Visual Studio 2019. It’s slightly more convenient than Visual Studio Code, because most of the sample projects include solution files, and some have separate server-side and client-side projects. All you need to play with these examples is the .NET Core SDK and the latest preview version of Visual Studio (Windows or Mac)._
Awesome Blazor Browser
It’s sometimes hard to find a good sample project when you’re learning something new. Some projects are trivially easy (like Blazor’s infamous counter page), while others will overwhelm you in a giant dump of data classes and third-party libraries. That’s why I love the super-simple Awesome Blazor Browser test project. It’s genuinely useful, and simple enough that even a Blazor newbie can digest it in one sitting.
#blazor #dotnet #csharp #programming #web-development
