Can you imagine .NET running in the browser? Is this a dream? Well, it’s not and its now reality and it’s called Blazor.

No, it’s not another Silverlight no additional plugins or add-ons are required to run.

Blazor is a open source .NET web UI framework which runs in the browser created by Microsoft as a Web UI framework based on C#, Razor, and HTML which runs in a browser via WebAssembly.

What makes Blazor very different and so exciting?

Blazor was solely designed as a simple way to build fast single-page web applications (SPA) that run in any browser with the ability to share code and libraries and based on the latest web standards.

What is so different is that Blazor lets you build interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript so both client and server code is in C#. Think React or Angular but powered by C# and Razor.

WebAssembly makes Blazor Possible

WebAssembly (Wasm) takes code in a programming language like C/C++/Rust and runs it within a web browser and this is what makes Blazor possible.

History of Blazor – Personal project that even wowed Microsoft

Blazor started out as a personal project by Steve Sanderson of Microsoft which he first showed at a software developers conference NDC Oslo in 2017. Features were very limited but the potential of what Blazor could do for single page applications(SPA) was obvious straight away.

November 5th 2017 – It’s purely experimental. Explaining how the first version started with DotNetAnywhere (DNA) a interpreted .NET CIL runtime that hadn’t been maintained for over 5 years.

February 6th 2018 – Steven Sanderson announced on his personal blog that Blazor had moved in ASP.NET organization to begin an experimental phase to see if it can develop it a full product.

DotNetAnywhere has now been replaced with Mono

Blazor is no longer experimental

April 18th, 2019 It’s in official preview! Graduated from experimental status to a preview. Blazor team member Daniel Roth blog post explained how it will be part of .NET Core 3.0

Server-side Blazor will ship as part of .NET Core 3.0. This was already announced last October.
Client-side Blazor won’t ship as part of the initial .NET Core 3.0 release, but we are now announcing it is committed to ship as part of a future .NET Core release (and hence is no longer an “experiment”).

Daniel Roth
Principal Program Manager, ASP.NET

Blazor is coming…

This is really exciting times ahead and such an advance for web development.

Want to chat and ask a question about Blazor with the Blazor community join them on Gitter or visit the Blazor homepage