Peter Himschoot - Microsoft Blazor: Building Web Applications in .NET 6 and Beyond

Building modern Single-Page Application websites today typically means writing JavaScript on the client and C# on the server when you are using the Microsoft development stack. But with Blazor, you can build everything using C# and reuse the knowledge and experience you gained with .NET. Porting existing C# applications like WinForms to the Web does not involve translating some of your logic to JavaScript; you can again reuse most of this code, resulting in less testing and bugs.

This book assumes you know C#, and you have some experience writing applications with it. Since this is also about web development, basic knowledge about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is also required. Completing this book will allow you to build professional applications with Blazor, including mastery of some harder topics like authentication. You will see learning Blazor is fun!

I wrote this book with practice in mind, so sit down next to your computer and follow along with the examples; the best way to learn is to just do things with Blazor. I did my best to make the code samples easy to read, but this means breaking lines of code to fit nicely on the page. When in doubt, you can always consult the included code, which you can download from the book's product page, located at www.apress.com/{{ISBN}} . You can find last-minute additions and errata at https://github.com/PeterHimschoot/microsoft-blazor-book-3 , including every sample and exercise using the latest version of .NET.

When Jonathan Gennick from Apress asked me if I would be interested in writing a book on Blazor, I felt honored and of course I agreed that Blazor deserves a book. Writing a book is a group effort, so I thank Jonathan Gennick and Jill Balzano for giving me tips on styling and writing this book, and I thank Gerald Versluis for doing the technical review and pointing out sections that needed a bit more explaining. I also thank Magda Thielman and Lieven Iliano from U2U, my employer, for encouraging me to write this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing this book, and I hope you will enjoy reading and learning from it.

As the first edition of Blazor Revealed was published (using pre-release software), the Blazor team had made a bunch of changes to the razor syntax, stopping my examples in the first edition of Blazor Revealed from working. Now that Blazor has been released and is completely official (YEAH!!!!), the time has come to publish an updated version of Blazor Revealed, now renamed as Microsoft Blazor.

Should you get stuck with an example, I invite you to consult the accompanying code samples for comparison purposes.

I wrote the third edition of Microsoft Blazor using the previews of .NET 6 to get this book in your hands right after the official release of .NET 6. This of course means that the last-minute changes made in October 2021 could not make it to this book. However, I have set up a repository in GitHub where you can find last-minute additions and errata at https://github.com/PeterHimschoot/microsoft-blazor-book-3 , including every sample and exercise using the latest version of .NET.