7 Features of Blazor That Make It an Outstanding Framework for Web Development

6 min readMay 19, 2023

Features of Blazor for Web Development

Blazor is an open-source web framework that allows developers to build interactive and high-performance web applications using C# and .NET. With its unique features, Blazor is becoming increasingly popular among web developers. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at seven features of Blazor that make it an outstanding framework for web development.

What is Blazor?

Blazor is a free and open-source web application framework developed by Microsoft that allows developers to build interactive and high-performance web applications using C# and .NET. Blazor supports two hosting models: server-side and client-side.

In server-side Blazor, the user interface components are rendered on the server and then sent to the client as HTML. The client then updates the user interface by communicating with the server via SignalR. This approach offers high levels of scalability and security but requires a constant connection to the server.

In client-side Blazor, the user interface components are compiled into WebAssembly code and executed in the browser. This approach offers better performance and responsiveness since the application can execute locally on the client machine without the need for a constant connection to the server.

Blazor uses Razor syntax, which is a markup syntax for creating dynamic web content using C#. Razor components are reusable building blocks that can be combined to create complex user interfaces. Blazor also supports dependency injection, which makes it easy to manage the application’s services and components.

Blazor can be used to build a wide range of web applications, including single-page applications, progressive web applications, and mobile applications using frameworks like Xamarin. With its unique features and support for the latest web standards, Blazor is becoming increasingly popular among web developers.

Zero restrictions with HTML and CSS

Blazor provides a great degree of flexibility when it comes to using HTML and CSS. Developers can use standard HTML and CSS, and can also take advantage of the power of C# code and Razor syntax to generate dynamic HTML and CSS.

With Blazor, developers can create custom HTML tags, and even create their own web components that can be reused across multiple pages. They can also use the full range of CSS features, including animations and transitions, to create highly interactive user interfaces.

Blazor also includes built-in support for Bootstrap, a popular CSS framework that helps developers build responsive and mobile-first web applications. Developers can use Bootstrap components in their Blazor applications by including the necessary CSS and JavaScript files.

CSS isolation

CSS isolation is a feature in Blazor that allows developers to define CSS styles that are scoped to individual components. This means that styles defined in one component will not affect the styles of another component. CSS isolation helps to improve the maintainability and organization of CSS code in large applications and reduces the risk of naming conflicts between different components. By providing built-in support for CSS isolation, Blazor makes it easier for developers to manage the styles for each component and create more modular and maintainable web applications.

SignalR as a NuGet package

SignalR is an open-source package that brings real-time web functionality to ASP.NET. Developers often utilize SignalR to allow server-side code to transmit asynchronous notifications to client-side web apps.

Since SignalR is offered as a NuGet package, it’s simple to link the Blazor application to a SignalR hub and carry out operations without the aid of JavaScript libraries.

The SignalR NuGet package is called Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR.Client.

How to Implement a Hub

Create a new Hubs folder in your project and a new class for the hub.

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR;

namespace BlazorApp.Server.Hubs

{

public class MyHub : Hub

{

public async Task SendMessage(string user, string message)

{

await Clients.All.SendAsync(“ReceiveMessage”, user, message);

}

Server-side prerendering in Blazor

With Blazor WebAssembly, you can create static applications that operate fully in the browser without a specific back end and are hosted on a service like Azure Web Apps, making the process less expensive.

However, the delay between supplying the web pages and presenting the data is a significant issue in single-page applications because the initial loading time might be very long. Blazor offers server-side prerendering to address this.

Prerendering makes information available faster by displaying the UI before the application is entirely downloaded. After that, the WebAssembly app takes control.

Even while the end-user experience would be smooth, one disadvantage of this technique is that you can no longer operate this application as a static app. Instead, you have to run it as a server application.

Hot reload

It is critical in web development to observe the output of changes to the application as soon as possible in order to spot mistakes in recent updates immediately.

Blazor offers hot reload, an awesome new feature that allows developers to see the browser’s output immediately with the.NET 6 release. This functionality unquestionably saves time and improves overall development efficiency.

Virtualization

Virtualization is a technique that limits UI rendering to display only the bits that are currently visible to the end user rather than rendering all things at once.

Consider a list of 100,000 items, where the user can only see 20 of them at once. Rendering them all from the start will have an impact on the application’s performance. Virtualization can be used to display only the first 20 items in the list till the user scrolls down the list.

How to implement virtualization

It is straightforward to implement virtualization with Blazor. We just need to wrap the list in the Virtualize component rather than a loop.

</Virtualize>

</div>

Virtualization helps prevent UI lag and improves performance by using the height of the container and the size of the items as measures to calculate the number of items to render.

Effective communication with gRPC-Web

gRPC is an RPC (remote procedure call) framework that effectively connects services inside and outside of data centers, enabling high-performance communication between endpoints.

Blazor supports this wonderful architecture, but browser constraints make it hard to construct a typical gRPC browser client directly. As a result, you must use gRPC-Web to interact between a browser application and a gRPC server.

How to implement gRPC

Because a Blazor WebAssembly program will include client, server, and shared projects, the following NuGet packages must be installed for each of them:

Shared project: Google.Protobuf, Grpc.Net.Client, Grpc.Tools

Server project: Grpc.AspNetCore, Grpc.AspNetCore.Web

Client project: Grpc.Net.Client.Web

gRPC communicates between the client and the service using proto files written in protocol buffer language. So, after installing the packages, you must add a proto file and service to the common channel and set up gRPC-Web in the server and the .NET client.

Lazy loading

To improve the performance of your application, you can use lazy loading with Blazor WebAssembly.

Lazy loading is a design approach that reduces load time by loading libraries on demand. It delays loading the requested resource until it is required, rather than downloading all resources during the first loading, boosting the application’s startup time.

This capability, however, is not used in server apps because they do not download assemblies to the client.

How to implement lazy loading

The process is simple. To begin, predefine the assemblies to be lazy-loaded in the applications.csproj configuration file.

</ItemGroup>

The BlazorWebAssemblyLazyLoad type shown in the above code snippet enables the included assembly to be lazy-loaded.

To lazy load the assemblies, we need to inject the AssemblyLoader into our App. razor file.

@inject LazyAssemblyLoader AssemblyLoader

App.razor

@inject LazyAssemblyLoader AssemblyLoader

<Router AppAssembly=”@typeof(Program).Assembly”

OnNavigateAsync=”@OnNavigateAsync”>

…

</Router>

@code {

private async Task OnNavigateAsync(NavigationContext args)

{

try

{

if (args.Path == “”)

{

var assemblies = await AssemblyLoader.LoadAssembliesAsync(

new\\\[\\\] { {LIST OF ASSEMBLIES} });

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

Logger.LogError(“Error: {Message}”, ex.Message);

}

OnNavigateAsync intercepts navigation to load the correct assemblies for endpoints when requested depending on route information.

Conclusion of the Features of Blazor

This article addressed the top seven qualities of the Features of Blazor that make it an excellent framework for web development. Blazor includes all of the modern capabilities that a web framework should have, such as routing, validation and forms, layouts, server-side rendering, and dependency injection.

As the Features of Blazor evolve into a sophisticated framework with frequent modifications to satisfy developing requirements, we urge you to give it a try before it’s too late.

Techcronus, Blazor component suite includes over 70 UI components that function smoothly with both server-side and client-side (WebAssembly) hosting models. Use them to build fantastic applications!

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