Exciting New Features in .NET 8 Blazor

Welcome to .NET 8

It's that time of year again where another release of .NET is on the horizon and with that, .NET 8 is bringing a host of exciting new features to Blazor, enhancing its capabilities and making it even more powerful for developers. In this blog we are going to explore some of the brand new features and enhancements coming to Blazor in this years release of .NET.

What is Blazor?

.NET Blazor is a framework for building interactive client-side web UI with .NET. It allows developers to create rich interactive UIs using C#, share server-side and client-side app logic written in .NET, and render the UI as HTML and CSS for wide browser support, including mobile browsers. It also enables the building of hybrid desktop and mobile apps.

Here’s a look at some of the key features that are coming this month:

Full-Stack Web UI Framework

With the release of .NET 8, Blazor is now a full-stack web UI framework for developing apps that render content at either the component or page level. This means you can build any style of web UI using Blazor components. This is a significant shift in the Blazor ecosystem since the introduction of hosting models and is set to position Blazor as the “go-to UI framework” for modern web applications built with .NET.

Render Modes & Hosting Model Consolidation

Blazor now supports interactive render modes that prerender content by default. This allows for more dynamic and responsive web applications. Every component in a Blazor Web App adopts a render mode to determine the hosting model that it uses, where it’s rendered, and whether or not it’s interactive. The available render modes for rendering Razor components in a Blazor Web App include Static, Interactive Server, Interactive WebAssembly, and Interactive Auto.

New Blazor Project Template

.NET 8introduces a new Blazor project template called “Blazor Web App”. This template provides a single starting point for using Blazor components to build any style of web UI. It combines the strengths of the existing Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly hosting models with the new Blazor capabilities added in .NET 8. These include static server rendering, streaming rendering, enhanced navigation and form handling, and the ability to add interactivity using either Blazor Server or Blazor WebAssembly on aper-component basis.

Component State Persistence

You can now persist and read component state in a Blazor Web App using the existing .NET framework. Blazor Web Apps automatically persist any registered state during prerendering. This feature is particularly useful in scenarios where users are actively creating data, not simply reading data that already exists.

Form Handling

Blazor components can now handle submitted form requests, including model binding and validating the request data. Components can implement forms with separate form handlers using the standard HTML form. This is a significant enhancement in .NET 8, as it allows Blazor to enhance page navigation and form handling by intercepting the request and performing a fetch request instead.

These are just a few of the exciting new features coming to .NET 8 Blazor. It is due to launch alongside the .NET Conference that is on from 14 – 16^th November 2023.

Orionfinity continue to push the boundaries by leveraging the brand new technology being released each year to ensure our solutions are cost effective, scaleable and secure, find out more about our Software Development services here

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