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Published May 6, 2021

Episode 458: Daniel Roth on Blazor

Daniel Roth delves into the world of Blazor, highlighting its robust development tools, security features, and stability provided by .NET libraries, while also comparing its advantages over JavaScript frameworks through WebAssembly integration for a seamless C# web development experience.
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  • Benefits

    Blazor offers a compelling alternative to JavaScript for .NET developers by allowing them to build interactive web UIs using C#. explains that Blazor enables developers to leverage their existing .NET skills and code, reducing the complexity of bridging different ecosystems 1. This approach not only enhances productivity but also results in significant cost savings, as demonstrated by companies like The Postage, which cut development costs in half by using Blazor across their stack 2.

    Blazor's goal was to make it so that you could reuse your .NET skills, your .NET code, your tools and your knowledge to build full stack web apps with just .NET.

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    While JavaScript remains a powerful tool, Blazor provides developers with more options, allowing them to choose the best tool for their specific needs 3.

       

    WebAssembly

    WebAssembly plays a crucial role in Blazor by enabling .NET code to run directly in browsers, offering an alternative to JavaScript. describes WebAssembly as a bytecode format that allows code to execute at near-native speeds across different platforms 4. This integration allows developers to use .NET assemblies in the browser without transpiling to JavaScript, providing a seamless development experience.

    WebAssembly is an open web standard. It's basically a bytecode format for the web.

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    However, Blazor WebAssembly apps can be larger in size, which may affect load times, but techniques like server-side pre-rendering can mitigate these issues 5.

       

    Performance

    Blazor's performance is a key consideration, especially when compared to JavaScript-based solutions. notes that while Blazor Server apps are lightweight and quick to load, Blazor WebAssembly apps are larger due to the inclusion of the .NET runtime 6. Despite this, Blazor employs clever techniques like DOM diffing to maintain fast UI rendering.

    Blazor does a very clever DOM diffing algorithm to figure out what did your components just change, and how much do I actually need to change in the live DOM?

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    For CPU-intensive tasks, Blazor WebAssembly may not be as fast as JavaScript, but ongoing improvements aim to enhance its performance 5.

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