What is Blazor and How does it works

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss about the amazing technology called Blazor. Personally after working on this amazing technology, it increased my development works so much productive and interesting. In this article, we will cover the overall features of Blazor like as,

• What is Blazor
• Why should we use Blazor
• Getting started with Blazor
• Blazor WebAssemby & Blazor Server

What is Blazor

A Blazor application is build out of the things that make up website, like HTML and CSS and also C# code. Blazor applications are build using Razor Components, which is an ASP.NET capability. These are the files consist of C# and HTML.

Let’s take an example, refer Fig.1, the Counter.razor component has a button that triggers onclick method IncrementCount(). Both the code resides in the same page and this what codes in Blazor application looks like, but we can also split the code and UI. The components are reusable blocks that you can use in your application also you can nest your components.

Why should we use Blazor

When a Blazor application is build, it produces assemblies amongst the other things. These DLLs are .NET Standard DLLs that you can use in any other compatible application, which means you can create a Blazor Component Library and reuse it. These DLLs are the everything that make up your application and its dependencies like system. DLLs.

In the browser, these DLLs can run by .NET runtime. This .NET runtime is a version that is compiled into WebAssembly byte code and has the WebAssembly file extension .wasm. This .NET runtime runs on WebAssembly in the browser. And in the web browser, the WebAssembly runs in the JavaScript runtime sandbox just like regular JavaScript code does. Here it runs the .NET runtime like mono.wasm which runs the DLLs of your Blazor applications.

And because all of this runs in the JavaScript runtime, your application can access the capabilities of the browser like webSockets, the File API and the DOM. It uses this to access the DOM to create and update the UI on the screen. Also it runs in the JavaScript runtime your application code can interact with JavaScript Code. You can call JavaScript from C#, and JavaScript can call your C# Code.

The Fig.2 shows the basic project structure of a Blazor WebAssembly.

Getting Started with Blazor

There are different ways to create a Blazor application. We can create Blazor application using Visual Studio which gives access to full suite of development tools that Microsoft has to offer. It does not matter which edition of visual studio are we using.

We can also develop Blazor application using Visual Studio Code , the lighter version of Visual Studio. And finally we can develop Blazor application using command-line interface.

First thing first, we need to download and install the latest version of the SDK and then pick the tool that we like to use. If we choose Visual Studio, then we need to make sure ASP.NET and Web Development Workload is Enabled.

If we choose Visual Studio Code, then Install latest VS Code C# extension, and if we choose common-line, we can simply create by running dotnet new.

Demo using Visual Studio

Do the steps as follows,

• Open Visual Studio
• Choose Create a new project option
• Choose Blazor App as the project template
• Configure the project by providing the location and meaningful name
• Choose either Blazor Server Application or Blazor WebAssembly App
• Now you have successfully created the Blazor Project

Blazor WebAssemby and Blazor Server

In the server-side hosting model (Blazor Server-Side), Blazor is executed on the server from within an ASP.NET Core app. UI updates, event handling, and JavaScript calls are handled over a SignalR connection.

In the client-side model (Blazor WebAssembly), the Blazor app, its dependencies, and the .NET runtime are downloaded to the browser, and the app is executed directly on the browser UI thread. All UI updates and event handling happen within the same process.

Consider to read

I am writing a details article series in Blazor technology, if you want to learn more about Blazor consider to follow those articles as well,

• Blazor: Zero To Hero – Part 1 
• Blazor: Zero To Hero – Part 2
• Blazor: Zero To Hero – Part 3
• Blazor: Zero To Hero – Part 4
• Blazor: Zero To Hero – Part 5
• Blazor: Zero To Hero – Part 6

Conclusion

I hope this article has given an overview of Blazor Application and you found this article much informative, Please drop your feedbacks in the comment section.