What is Blazor and what does is mean for software developers?
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Steve Sanderson and Daniel Roth recently announced the first public preview of Blazor - Steve announced it on Reddit and Daniel on the ASP NET Blog.
You'll remember that I wrote a little about Blazor a few weeks back. Since then I've been watching the news for anything and everything Blazor, and it's certainly starting to do the rounds.
Both Steve and Daniel have been on .NET Rocks! talking about it, back in February - Carl and Richard actually had to delay that episode because the ASP NET team had an announcement about Blazor becoming an official ASP NET Core package. But today's announcement gives us access to a new template for .NET Core (for both the command line interface AND Visual Studio).
Getting up and running with Blazor for software development projects
In order to get experimenting with Blazor (and please remember that it's a public preview, so there will be edge cases and things which aren't quite right), you'll need to install the latest previews of both .NET Core (2.1 Preview 1 SDK) and Visual Studio (2017 15.7). Luckily both of these products can be installed side-by-side with current installations (if you have enough hard drive space).
Visual Studio
Once you've done that, a new Blazor project can be created in Visual Studio by heading to:
- File
- New Project
- Web
- ASP NET Core Web Application
- Choosing .NET Core and ASP NET Core 2.0 in the new project window selectors
- Choosing Blazor and hitting OK
Command Line
If you're more of a command line person, then creating a Blazor project is a case of:
dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates
dotnet new blazor -o BlazorApp
cd BlazorApp
dotnet run
What’s great about the announcement post is that it not only shows how to create a basic app (but of course it’s a TODO app) with Blazor, but it also shows that it can be published and run on Azure right now.
Feedback
The whole Blazor team are asking for feedback on the public preview, so make sure to head over to the Reddit announcement or the GitHub repo and let them know what you think.
The next few weeks are going to be exciting, that's for sure.
