News

Progress Previews Telerik UI for Blazor

• By David Ramel
• 01/23/2019

Tooling vendor Progress said developers in the .NET ecosystem asked it to support Microsoft's experimental Blazor project, which it has just done in a new release.

The company today announced a preview of Telerik UI for Blazor is included in the new release of Progress Telerik tooling for .NET developers.

Blazor is an experimental project from Microsoft that seeks to leverage yet another experimental project, called WebAssembly, to provide an assembly-like compilation target so higher-level programming languages such as C, C++, Rust and -- in the case of Blazor, C# -- can be used for Web development instead of the oft-maligned JavaScript commonly used for browser-based code. Blazor is also a "full stack" development option, as it's also used for server-side code.

Despite those multiple "experimental" classifications, Blazor has taken much of the .NET-based Web development world by storm with its intriguing possibilities, and analytics shows that it's one of the most popular topics among readers of Visual Studio Magazine.

Even though Blazor just recently reached version 0.7.0 -- and with the server-side effort seeing some problems -- Progress is among the early vendors to jump on the Blazor bandwagon, prompted by "countless feedback items" from developers asking the firm to support the next-generation platform.

"The R1 2019 release builds on that drive and promise to you to be the first to market, and today we maybe go even one step further -- throwing our support behind the still experimental Blazor framework from Microsoft," said Sasha Krsmanovic in a Jan. 16 blog post, after noting that company engineers like to tinker with new technology.

"By being the one of the first teams to throw our support behind a what is currently an experimental framework, we want to help Blazor mature faster and ensure the ecosystem around it is ready for all of you who are as passionate about it as we are," Krsmanovic continued.

The Blazor UI components in this initial preview include DataGrid, Button and TabStrip.

Progress developer advocate Ed Charbeneau published a detailed article on how to work with those components, with a hands-on tutorial included in an extensive discussion of what Blazor is, the Razor Components server-side effort, recommended reading and other resources.

"Throughout the year Microsoft will be working on Blazor (aka Razor Components) as part of ASP.NET Core 3.0," he concluded. "We plan on keeping Telerik UI for Blazor up to date as the project progresses and look forward to hearing your feedback, see what you’ve built, and know what components you need for your next app."

Beyond the experimental Blazor, the big new release from Progress also includes a plethora of new features and functionality for other tools in the suite, including its offerings for Web development (Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET Core, MVC and AJAX); mobile (Progress Telerik UI for Xamarin); desktop (Progress Telerik UI for WPF and WinForms), and reporting, testing and productivity tools.

As part of yet another offering, Progress Telerik DevCraft tools, the company also released a new version of Progress Kendo UI, used to build modern Web UI. With that, Progress said, it has become the only vendor to offer pure native components for three popular modern JavaScript frameworks: Angular, React and Vue.