What’s next for client-side Blazor

.NET Conf 2019 was full of great news and interesting pieces of information for those who love .NET world like me. It was specially interesting for me to watch presentation The Future of Blazor on the Client by Dan Roth who introduced on-going work with Blazor and plans for near future. Here’s my short overview with explanations about what’s going on.

Here’s the roadmap for client-side Blazor shown by Dan Roth during his presentation.

• Blazor Server – This is server-side Blazor that was launched with .NET Core 3.0. UI runs in browser but it is controlled by server-side code. Communication between browser and server is done using SignalR.
   
• Blazor WebAssembly – This is the current client-side Blazor as we know it. Although we write C# code that runs on browser it is compiled to WebAssembly format and is run in same permissions as JavaScript. WebAssembly is not reincarnation of ActiveX, Java applet of Flash animation.
   
• Blazor PWA – Microsoft guys are experimenting with Progressive Web Applications (PWA) and Blazor to see how to make Blazor applications work as PWA. These applications can run also offline. Take it as an web application with offline support. I built once offline beer calculator on Blazor that uses legacy technologies for caching and offline work. Microsoft is now targeting service workers as this is the current way to build offline web applications.
   
• Blazor Hybrid – Another experiment to find out how to make Blazor applications work with Electron and WebView. Electron is framework to build cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. WebView is browser component used in Android applications. These applications can also run online and offline.
   
• Blazor Native – Currently just an interesting idea to compile Blazor applications as desktop ones without using HTML-based UI. This is interesting approach as it may end up with web developers being able to build native desktop applications using the tooling and technologies they already know.

Blazor has been amazing journey this far for those who use and play with it. I consider it as the most interesting thing ever happened in Visual Studio world and release by release Blazor still keeps suprising me.

First stable release of client-side Blazor is planned to launch at May 2020.