Hello Blazor

Thank you for picking up your copy of Web Development with Blazor. This book intends to get you started as quickly and smoothly as possible, chapter by chapter.

This book will start by guiding you through the most common scenarios you’ll come across when you begin your journey with Blazor, and you will also dive into a few advanced scenarios later on. This book aims to show you what Blazor is – Blazor Server, Blazor WebAssembly, Blazor Hybrid, and on top of that, the new Server-Side Rendering (SSR) – and how it all works practically to help you avoid traps.

This is the book’s third edition; much has happened since the first edition. .NET 6 and .NET 7 were released, and for the second edition, I updated the content to reflect the latest changes and functionalities at the time of writing.

This edition has been updated to include all the new things in .NET 8, and there is a lot to uncover.

I hold Blazor presentations all over the world, and there are common questions that I get asked a lot. Without going into too much detail, they are often related to download size or time when it comes to Blazor WebAssembly and continuous connection to Blazor Server. In .NET 8, we can leverage a new mode, SSR, that solves all of these problems in one swift blow. Okay, maybe not all problems, but we are well on our way to solving them. A common belief is that Blazor is WebAssembly, but WebAssembly is just one way of running Blazor. Many books, workshops, and blog posts on Blazor focus heavily on WebAssembly.

This book will cover Blazor WebAssembly, Blazor Server, Blazor Hybrid, and SSR. There are a few differences between the different ways of running Blazor; I will point them out as we go along.

This first chapter will explore where Blazor came from, what technologies made Blazor possible, and the different ways of running Blazor. We will also touch on which type (Blazor WebAssembly, Blazor Server, or Blazor Hybrid) is best for you.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why Blazor?
• Preceding Blazor
• Introducing WebAssembly
• Introducing .NET 8
• Introducing Blazor