Chapter 1: Hello Blazor

Thank you for picking up your copy of Web Development with Blazor. This book intends to get you started as quickly and pain-free as possible, chapter by chapter, without you having to read this book from cover to cover before getting your Blazor on.

This book will start by guiding you through the most common scenarios you'll come across when you start your journey with Blazor, and will also dive into a few more advanced scenarios. The goal of this book is to show you what Blazor is – both Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly – how it all works practically, and to help you avoid any traps along the way.

A common belief is that Blazor is WebAssembly, but WebAssembly is just one way of running Blazor. Many books, workshops, and blog posts on Blazor focus heavily on WebAssembly. This book will cover both WebAssembly and server side. There are a few differences between Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly, and I will point those out as we go along.

This first chapter will explore where Blazor came from, what technologies made Blazor possible, and the different ways of running Blazor. We will also touch on which type is best for you.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Preceding Blazor
• Introducing WebAssembly
• Introducing .NET 5
• Introducing Blazor