.NET Conf has been and gone for another year, but this one was particularly special. .NET Core 3 was officially released and with it comes the first official version of Blazor!

Personally, I’m so excited to see this happen. I found Blazor in early March 2018, a few weeks before the first preview (0.1.0) was released. I immediately became a fan, and it’s fair to say, Blazor changed by life.

It inspired me to focus on this blog and to get more involved in the open source community. A year and a half later and I’ve authored more than 40 blog posts on Blazor, I’ve written about Blazor for both Visual Studio Magazine and Progress Telerik, I’ve created several open source packages for Blazor with over 20,000 downloads and started speaking. Not to mention being awarded as a Microsoft MVP! I have a lot to thank Blazor and the Blazor community for.

Finally, I’m so happy for everyone on the Blazor team, they have done fantastic job getting to this point and there are so many more great things to come. Thank you for all the work you done.

Anyway, let’s move on and talk about all the Blazor news and content from .NET Conf 2019!

Blazor Server is now released

This is the one we have all been waiting for, Blazor Server was officially released with .NET Core 3 during the keynote from Scott Hunter. I know there are a lot of people who are waiting for Blazor WebAssembly but this is a great first step for Blazor as a framework.

I’ve noticed a big spike in the amount of people talking about Blazor since .NET Conf and having the framework out there as a production supported product, I think, makes a big difference to it’s perception.

Blazor WebAssembly - Release date announced

Something a lot of us have been hoping to hear for a while was also announced - The release date for Blazor WebAssembly. There has been a lot of speculation in the community about when it might be production ready. Daniel Roth said back at Build that, unofficially, he felt we might see it around Q1/Q2 2020.

Well, the speculation is now over and Blazor WebAssembly is expected in May 2020! Which should put it right around Build time next year.

It’s great to finally have a due date for what a lot of people consider to be the main draw of Blazor. We should start seeing a lot more development on it as well, especially once .NET Core 3.1 is released in November.

I think it’s going to be an exciting time in the build up to May!

New Blazor e-book from Microsoft

Microsoft has released a new e-book, Blazor for ASP.NET Web Forms Developers. The free publication focuses on introducing Blazor and it’s concepts to ASP.NET Web Forms developers. It also has advice on how to plan a migration from Web Forms to Blazor.

Blazor is a good migration path for legacy Web Forms applications and Microsoft want to help out devs looking to take that journey as much as possible.

Here is a little summary of the e-book from the Microsoft site:

This book is for ASP.NET Web Forms developers looking for an introduction to Blazor that relates to their existing knowledge and skills. This book can help with quickly getting started on a new Blazor-based project or to help chart a roadmap for modernizing an existing ASP.NET Web Forms application.

Blazor Talks

There were 3 great Blazor talks delivered during the online event. Two came from Daniel Roth - Program Manager on the ASP.NET team. And one came from Jeff Hollan - Principal PM for Azure Serverless.

All three are worth a watch and have great information - as always.

Building Full-stack C# Web Apps with Blazor in .NET Core 3.0

Dan’s first talk, Building Full-stack C# Web Apps with Blazor in .NET Core 3.0, focuses on building Blazor applications using the newly released, Blazor Server.

The Future of Blazor on the Client

Dan’s second talk, **** The Future of Blazor on the Client, focuses on Blazor WebAssembly. Dan also shows the potential of Blazor as a framework, showing how it can be used to build desktop applications via Electron and even full native applications!

Blazor and Azure Functions for Serverless Websites

Jeff’s talk focuses on building serverless applications using Blazor and Azure Functions.

Summary

Unsurprisingly, it was a pretty fantastic event for us Blazor fans. Blazor became an officially released product and we found out when we should see Blazor WebAssembly released.

There was also great content with the three awesome Blazor sessions from Daniel Roth and Jeff Hollan. Not to mention a free e-book being released as well!

It’s been a exciting journey watching Blazor grow from the experiment it started off as, to being an officially released product ready for production. What’s more, it’s all happened in about 18 months! I don’t know about you, but if this is how far we’ve come in 18 months, I really can’t wait to see what the next 18 will bring for Blazor.