News
Blazor WebAssembly 3.2 Release Candidate Arrives
The previews are over as Microsoft today shipped Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Release Candidate, making the red-hot project just one step away from production-ready general availability on track to debut sometime in May (note: the 2020 Build developer conference starts May 19).
Blazor WebAssembly is the client-side effort for Blazor, which uses the ability of WebAssembly to compile C# code into an assembly-like language for use in web development, letting Microsoft-centric developers target the browser without having to rely almost exclusively on JavaScript. While the server-side component (Blazor Server) of Blazor -- part of ASP.NET Core -- shipped last September along with .NET Core 3.0, the problematic client-side component has lagged.
The fifth preview of Blazor WebAssembly 3.2 was just released a week ago. Now with the release candidate, it's pretty much the final product.
"This release contains all of the features and improvements that we expect to release for the upcoming Blazor WebAssembly release. There are no more breaking changes planned at this point," said Daniel Roth, principal program manager for ASP.NET in an April 30 post.
As the final goodies have solidified in the five previews, Roth called out only two new features in the RC:
- Developers can now customize how boot resources -- .NET runtime, the bootstrapping JavaScript code, locale-specific data, and required .NET assemblies -- are loaded with a new API.
- API reference docs for the Blazor WebAssembly namespaces (Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.*) are now available in the .NET API browser as part of the ASP.NET Core 3.1 API documentation.
For now, developers should note that this RC needs version 3.1.201 or later of the .NET Core SDK to be installed and still contains one blocking issue that will be fixed before GA: "When publishing a ASP.NET Core hosted Blazor WebAssembly app using Visual Studio, satellite assemblies from the client application do not get copied to the publish folder."
With that in mind, developers are asked to help the dev team fine-tune the final release.
"This is our last planned preview release of Blazor WebAssembly 3.2!" Roth said. "We need your help to make sure that we've addressed any remaining blocking issues for the upcoming release. Please give it a try and let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.