Last week saw the first ever virtual Build event from Microsoft and I thought they did an amazing job with it. Apparently over 200,000 people registered for the free event with around 65% of virtual attendees from outside the US. There were loads of great announcements on products ranging from Office to Azure, but as you would expect, I was most excited for the Blazor bits.

In this post, I’ve put together a round up of all the Blazor news from Build 2020.

Blazor WebAssembly goes GA

The biggest announcement by far was that on May 19th 2020, after just over 2 years in development, Blazor WebAssembly is officially released. I’m so happy for the Blazor team to hit this milestone and huge congratulations to them for their amazing work so far.

You can read the official announcement on the ASP.NET Blog. I’ve also written a more in-depth blog post about the release for Progress Telerik which can be found on their blog.

Modern Web UI with Blazor WebAssembly

Steve Sanderson gave a great new presentation on Blazor titled Modern Web UI with Blazor WebAssembly. In the 45 minute video Steve covers some of the major features of Blazor WebAssembly:

  • Authorization
  • Code Sharing
  • JavaScript Interop
  • Debugging
  • Internationalization
  • Progressive Web Apps

He also shows how to host a Blazor WebAssembly app on GitHub pages before finishing with a look at what the team are working on for .NET 5.

Build a web app with Blazor WebAssembly and Visual Studio Code

There was a great guided workshop session which walks developers through building Blazor WebAssembly apps using Visual Studio Code. The workshop is available on Microsoft Learn for anyone to work through at their own pace.

The workshop is aimed at new comers to Blazor and start with the basic like getting your development environment setup, through creating a new Blazor project and adding your own logic. If you’re someone who is looking to get into Blazor for the first time, this course would be a great place to get started.

Microsoft Learn - Build a web app with Blazor WebAssembly and Visual Studio Code

.NET Multi-platform App UI

Another interesting announcement for Blazor developers who are interested in Mobile Blazor Bindings (see my blog series on it if you want to know more) was the news of .NET MAUI.

.NET MAUI is the evolution of Xamarin Forms and will be coming in the .NET 6 time frame with previews hopefully by the end of 2020. .NET MAUI will come with a whole new renderer and project setup. There will only be one project needed now to target multiple platforms, rather than the current project per target. But what’s most interesting is that developers will be able to write .NET MAUI apps using either MVVM, RxUI, MVU or Blazor.

Once this is in place, it means Blazor developers can write UI for web, desktop and mobile platforms across, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. How amazing would that be!

Summary

That wraps things up from Build 2020, there were some great announcements and content for us Blazor fans. But there is also so much to look forward to in .NET 5 which is coming in November, only 6 months away.

Most of the content from Build 2020 is being made available on Channel 9, there were so many other great session I would really recommend checking them out if you have some time.