Blazor Update Adds Reusable Component Libraries -- Visual Studio Magazine

Blazor Update Adds Reusable Component Libraries

By David Ramel
04/19/2018

Microsoft has updated Blazor -- for full-stack Web apps coded in C# -- with new features including the ability to create reusable component libraries.

Blazor leverages the new WebAssembly project that converts higher-level language code to assembly-like code for performance better than JavaScript. WebAssembly also works with programming languages such as C, C++ and Rust. While Blazor/WebAssembly has been described as the "death" of JavaScript by some developers, Microsoft denies such a characterization, saying it's rather just another tool to be used, even in conjunction with JavaScript.

In fact, the Blazor 0.2.0 update announced this week allows for JavaScript interop as part of the new ability to create reusable component libraries.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** A Blazor Component *(source: Microsoft).*

"Blazor apps can call browser APIs or JavaScript libraries through JavaScript interop," Microsoft's Daniel Roth announced in a post. "Library authors can create .NET wrappers for browser APIs or JavaScript libraries and share them as reusable class libraries."

Those reusable libraries can provide Web UI components to be used in different projects while maintaining state and handling events. Developers can create the components, package and share them with others.

Other new features in the update include:

Improved syntax for event handling and data binding
Build on save in Visual Studio
Conditional attributes
HttpClient improvements

Roth thanked community volunteers for helping out with the improvements, noting that Blazor has already been put to use in developing real-world Web apps.

Meanwhile, WebAssembly itself is forging ahead, with v 1.0 shipping in four major browser engines. Mozilla, a primary backer of the project, recently offered up a Web-based IDE to code WebAssembly, though at this stage it's primarily a learning/fiddle (testing) type of project. With further refinement, its features could be provided to Visual Studio Code and other code editors/IDEs via extensions.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.