News

What's New in Blazor Tooling Updates

• By David Ramel
• 08/11/2020

In its documentation, Microsoft says the Blazor UI component system includes re-usable UI components from top vendors including Telerik, DevExpress, Syncfusion and Radzen.

Blazor, of course, is the red-hot project from Microsoft that allows for browser/web app development with C# instead of having to rely upon JavaScript, as most other web app frameworks and UI toolkits do.

Here's a quick look at what all four third-party vendors have offered lately in this rapidly developing space:

Telerik
Formerly an independent company, Telerik, now part of Progress, just last week introduced the latest update (v2.16.0) to Telerik UI for Blazor.

The release features four new Blazor components:

• Editor
• TreeList
• Stock Chart
• Context Menu

It also enhances the Grid, Chart and Menu components and allows developers to take advantage of new exposed Grid events to provide flexibility in applying custom logic when interacting with data rows in Blazor applications.

DevExpress
This company less than three weeks ago summarized what's new in its DevExpress UI for Blazor (v20.1.5) offering, which now supports .NET Core 3.1.5.

New features and functionality include:

• Data Grid enhancements to Filter Row and ComboBox Column

• Better Navigation via a Toolbar adaptivity enhancement. To serve developers targeting mobile devices, the company added a popup and modal mode for the Toolbar's drop-down window. DevExpress said the modes mimic the behavior of a standard drop down control on mobile browsers.

  

• Editor tweaks concerning Drop-Down Width Mode and Min/Max Dates

The company details what's new in v20.1 here.

Syncfusion
The company late last month introduced the latest offering, Syncfusion Essential Studio 2020 Volume 2.

That suite of .NET-related and other tools serves up more than just Blazor offerings, also containing many goodies for Xamarin, Flutter, Essential JS 2 (JavaScript), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and more.

For Blazor specifically, the host of improvements includes:

• A Mac installer for Syncfusion Blazor is now available.
• The following components were developed to meet industrial standards and are marked as production-ready:
  • Card
  • Progress Bar

• The performance of the Grid components has been improved in several ways:

  • Initial loading
  • Grouping
  • Ungrouping
  • Applying filter
  • Clearing filter
  • Sorting
• The Charts component comes with smart labels for pie and doughnut variants.
• The Scheduler component has been enhanced with virtual scrolling and year view features.
• The Pivot Table now supports CSV data sources.
• The Word Processor now allows developers to design forms using legacy form fields in a Word document and fill the form, as well.
• The PDF Viewer allows freehand drawing to be saved in PDF files in the form of ink annotations.

Radzen
This company offers a low-code, rapid application development (RAD) solution which allows developers to visually build web applications. The latest edition of its flagship offering is Radzen 2.51.6 for Windows.

The company just a couple weeks ago announced newly added features, including Windows Authentication and a new MaterialDark theme.

It also unveiled built-in multi-tenancy support for Blazor

"When security is enabled Radzen offers multi-tenancy support (not available in community version)," Radzen said. "Multi-tenancy allows single instance of Radzen application to serve multiple tenants."

New guidance details how to create tenants, deploy to IIS and more.

The Latest from Microsoft
As far as official Microsoft offerings, the company announced that Blazor WebAssembly (the client-side component) now targets .NET 5. This news came in a description of what's new for ASP.NET Core (which includes Blazor) in the recent .NET 5 Preview 7.