What is Blazor?
Blazor is an open-source web framework that enables developers to build web apps using dotNET technologies with C#, HTML and CSS.
Being a Single Page Application framework for dotNET allows developers with experience with the dotNET ecosystem to build modern web applications without the use of other technologies which can cause development issues when switching between multiple languages and techniques.
When Blazor was first shown, what it offered for single-page applications (SPA’s) was evident straight away. Developers using Microsoft technologies to build enterprise-level systems had been waiting for something like this for a while and it created a lot of excitement.
Where did the name Blazor come from? It is a combination of two words Browser and Razor.
Blazor comes in two flavours, Server-Side and Web Assembly. For a more detailed explanation of Blazor check out the Blazor page on the Mircosoft site.
The server-side flavour works in a very similar way to other web technologies where the HTML and CSS code is generated on the server from a Razor view and then sent down to the client’s browser to be displayed to the user. It has one major difference in that only the changes between what the user is currently viewing and what the view will change to will be sent to the browser instead of sending the whole of the generated code over and over again. WebAssembly is very different in that instead of executing Razor views on the server to present HTML to the browser, the entire Blazor application is sent to the client’s browser and the whole codebase is executed there locally on that client’s machine. The code in both versions is the same dotNET code with very little difference but how it executes and what can be achieved is quite different.
Want to start learning Blazor?
Here at Blazor Tutorial, I want to share my passion and show you what you could achieve.
Who created Blazor?
So who created Blazor? Steve Sanderson Principal Software Engineering Lead at Microsoft is who created Blazor. It actually started out as a personal project but amazed the community and Microsoft so much that they supported its development.
Steve who created Blazor is British born and studied Mathematics at Cambridge University before starting work at Microsoft in 2010 joining the ASP.NET team
Steve Sanderson describes Blazor in his blog as “What is Blazor?
It’s a framework for browser-based (client-side) applications written in .NET, running under WebAssembly. It gives you all the benefits of a rich, modern single-page application (SPA) platform while letting you use .NET end-to-end, including sharing code across server and client. “
Is Blazor worth learning?
100% yes, and then some… Blazor gives you a full-stack dotNET development ability without learning multiple languages and tech stacks.