Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 2 release now available
A new preview update of Blazor WebAssembly is now available! Here’s what’s new in this release:
- Integration with ASP.NET Core static web assets
- Token-based authentication
- Improved framework caching
- Updated linker configuration
- Build Progressive Web Apps
Get started
To get started with Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 2 install the latest .NET Core 3.1 SDK.
NOTE: Version 3.1.102 or later of the .NET Core SDK is required to use this Blazor WebAssembly release! Make sure you have the correct .NET Core SDK version by running
dotnet --version
from a command prompt.
Once you have the appropriate .NET Core SDK installed, run the following command to install the update Blazor WebAssembly template:
dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Templates::3.2.0-preview2.20160.5
That’s it! You can find additional docs and samples on https://blazor.net.
Upgrade an existing project
To upgrade an existing Blazor WebAssembly app from 3.2.0 Preview 1 to 3.2.0 Preview 2:
- Update your package references and namespaces as described below:
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Build -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.DevServer -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.DevServer
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Server -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Server
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.HttpClient -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.HttpClient (unchanged)
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.DataAnnotations.Validation -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.DataAnnotations.Validation
- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Mono -> Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Runtime
- Mono.WebAssembly.Interop -> Microsoft.JSInterop.WebAssembly
- Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.* package references to version 3.2.0-preview2.20160.5.
- In Program.cs add a call to
builder.Services.AddBaseAddressHttpClient()
. - Rename
BlazorLinkOnBuild
in your project files toBlazorWebAssemblyEnableLinking
. - If your Blazor WebAssembly app is hosted using ASP.NET Core, make the following updates in Startup.cs in your Server project:
- Rename
UseBlazorDebugging
toUseWebAssemblyDebugging
. - Remove the calls to
services.AddResponseCompression
andapp.UseResponseCompression()
(response compression is now handled by the Blazor framework). - Replace the call to
app.UseClientSideBlazorFiles<Client.Program>()
withapp.UseBlazorFrameworkFiles()
. - Replace the call to
endpoints.MapFallbackToClientSideBlazor<Client.Program>("index.html")
withendpoints.MapFallbackToFile("index.html")
.
- Rename
Hopefully that wasn’t too painful!
NOTE: The structure of a published Blazor WebAssembly app has also changed as part of this release, which may require you to update how you deploy your apps. See the “Integration with ASP.NET Core static web assets” section below for details.
Integration with ASP.NET Core static web assets
Blazor WebAssembly apps now integrate seamlessly with how ASP.NET Core handles static web assets. Blazor WebAssembly apps can use the standard ASP.NET Core convention for consuming static web assets from referenced projects and packages: _content/{LIBRARY NAME}/{path}. This allows you to easily pick up static assets from referenced component libraries and JavaScript interop libraries just like you can in a Blazor Server app or any other ASP.NET Core web app.
Blazor WebAssembly apps are also now hosted in ASP.NET Core web apps using the same static web assets infrastructure. After all, a Blazor WebAssembly app is just a bunch of static files!
This integration simplifies the startup code for ASP.NET Core hosted Blazor WebAssembly apps and removes the need to have an assembly reference from the server project to the client project. Only the project reference is needed, so setting ReferenceOutputAssembly
to false
for the client project reference is now supported.
Building on the static web assets support in ASP.NET Core also enables new scenarios like hosting ASP.NET Core hosted Blazor WebAssembly apps in Docker containers. In Visual Studio you can add docker support to your Blazor WebAssembly app by right-clicking on the Server project and selecting Add > Docker support.
As a result of this change, the structure of the published output of a Blazor WebAssembly app is now more consistent with other ASP.NET Core apps. A Blazor WebAssembly app is now published to the /bin/Release/netstandard2.1/publish/wwwroot folder (a dist folder is no longer generated). To publish a standalone Blazor WebAssembly app as a static site, copy the contents of the published wwwroot folder to your static site host. If the Blazor WebAssembly app is hosted in an ASP.NET Core app, the client Blazor WebAssembly app is published into the wwwroot folder of the published server app just like any other static web asset.
Token-based authentication
Blazor WebAssembly now has built-in support for token-based authentication.
Blazor WebAssembly apps are secured in the same manner as Single Page Applications (SPAs). There are several approaches for authenticating users to SPAs, but the most common and comprehensive approach is to use an implementation based on the OAuth 2.0 protocol, such as OpenID Connect (OIDC). OIDC allows client apps, like a Blazor WebAssembly app, to verify the user identity and obtain basic profile information using a trusted provider.
Using the Blazor WebAssembly project template you can now quickly create apps setup for authentication using:
- ASP.NET Core Identity and IdentityServer
- An existing OpenID Connect provider
- Azure Active Directory
Authenticate using ASP.NET Core Identity and IdentityServer
Authentication for Blazor WebAssembly apps can be handled using ASP.NET Core Identity and IdentityServer. ASP.NET Core Identity handles authenticating users while IdentityServer handles the necessary protocol endpoints.
To create a Blazor WebAssembly app setup with authentication using ASP.NET Core Identity and IdentityServer run the following command:
dotnet new blazorwasm --hosted --auth Individual -o BlazorAppWithAuth1
If you’re using Visual Studio, you can create the project by selecting the “ASP.NET Core hosted” option and the selecting “Change Authentication” > “Individual user accounts”.
Run the app and try to access the Fetch Data page. You’ll get redirected to the login page.
Register a new user and log in. You can now access the Fetch Data page.
The Server project is configured to use the default ASP.NET Core Identity UI, as well as IdentityServer, and JWT authentication:
// Add the default ASP.NET Core Identity UI
services.AddDefaultIdentity<ApplicationUser>(options => options.SignIn.RequireConfirmedAccount = true)
.AddEntityFrameworkStores<ApplicationDbContext>();
// Add IdentityServer with support for API authorization
services.AddIdentityServer()
.AddApiAuthorization<ApplicationUser, ApplicationDbContext>();
// Add JWT authentication
services.AddAuthentication()
.AddIdentityServerJwt();
The Client app is registered with IdentityServer in the appsettings.json file:
"IdentityServer": {
"Clients": {
"BlazorAppWithAuth1.Client": {
"Profile": "IdentityServerSPA"
}
}
},
In the Client project, the services needed for API authorization are added in Program.cs:
builder.Services.AddApiAuthorization();
In FetchData.razor the IAccessTokenProvider
service is used to acquire an access token from the server. The token may be cached or acquired without the need of user interaction. If acquiring the token succeeds, it is then applied to the request for weather forecast data using the standard HTTP Authorization header. If acquiring the token silently fails, the user is redirected to the login page:
protected override async Task OnInitializedAsync()
{
var httpClient = new HttpClient();
httpClient.BaseAddress = new Uri(Navigation.BaseUri);
var tokenResult = await AuthenticationService.RequestAccessToken();
if (tokenResult.TryGetToken(out var token))
{
httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Authorization", $"Bearer {token.Value}");
forecasts = await httpClient.GetJsonAsync<WeatherForecast[]>("WeatherForecast");
}
else
{
Navigation.NavigateTo(tokenResult.RedirectUrl);
}
}
For additional details on using Blazor WebAssembly with ASP.NET Core Identity and IdentityServer see Secure an ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly hosted app with Identity Server
Authenticate using an existing OpenID Connect provider
You can setup authentication for a standalone Blazor WebAssembly using any valid OIDC provider. Once you’ve registered your app with the OIDC provider you configure the Blazor WebAssembly app to use that provider by calling AddOidcAuthentication
in Program.cs:
builder.Services.AddOidcAuthentication(options =>
{
options.ProviderOptions.Authority = "{AUTHORITY}";
options.ProviderOptions.ClientId = "{CLIENT ID}";
});
You can create a standalone Blazor WebAssembly app that uses a specific OIDC provider for authentication using the following command:
dotnet new blazorwasm --auth Individual --client-id "{CLIENT ID}" --authority "{AUTHORITY}"
For more details on configuring authentication for a standalone Blazor WebAssembly app see Secure an ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly standalone app with the Authentication library
Authenticate using Azure AD & Azure AD B2C
You can also setup Blazor WebAssembly apps to use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or Azure Active Directory Business-to-Customer (Azure AD B2C) for authentication. When authenticating using Azure AD or Azure AD B2C authentication is handled using the new Microsoft.Authentication.WebAssembly.Msal library, which is based on the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL.js).
To learn how to setup authentication for Blazor WebAssembly app using Azure AD or Azure AD B2C see:
- Secure an ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly hosted app with Azure Active Directory
- Secure an ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly hosted app with Azure Active Directory B2C
Additional authentication resources
This is just a sampling of the new authentication capabilities in Blazor WebAssembly. To learn more about how Blazor WebAssembly supports authentication see Secure ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly.
Improved framework caching
If you look at the network trace of what’s being download for a Blazor WebAssembly app after it’s initially loaded, you might think that Blazor WebAssembly has been put on some sort of extreme diet:
Whoa! Only 159kB? What’s going on here?
When a Blazor WebAssembly app is initially loaded, the runtime and framework files are now stored in the browser cache storage:
When the app loads, it first uses the contents of the blazor.boot.json to check if it already has all of the runtime and framework files it needs in the cache. If it does, then no additional network requests are necessary.
You can still see what the true size of the app is during development by checking the browser console:
Updated linker configuration
You may notice with this preview release that the download size of the app during development is now a bit larger, but build times are faster. This is because we no longer run the .NET IL linker during development to remove unused code. In previous Blazor previews we ran the linker on every build, which slowed down development. Now we only run the linker for release builds, which are typically done as part of publishing the app. When publishing the app with a release build (dotnet publish -c Release
), the linker removes any unnecessary code and the download size is much more reasonable (~2MB for the default template).
If you prefer to still run the .NET IL linker on each build during development, you can turn it on by adding <BlazorWebAssemblyEnableLinking>true</BlazorWebAssemblyEnableLinking>
to your project file.
Build Progressive Web Apps with Blazor
A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web-based app that uses modern browser APIs and capabilities to behave like a native app. These capabilities can include:
- Working offline and always loading instantly, independently of network speed
- Being able to run in its own app window, not just a browser window
- Being launched from the host operating system (OS) start menu, dock, or home screen
- Receiving push notifications from a backend server, even while the user is not using the app
- Automatically updating in the background
A user might first discover and use the app within their web browser like any other single-page app (SPA), then later progress to installing it in their OS and enabling push notifications.
Blazor WebAssembly is a true standards-based client-side web app platform, so it can use any browser API, including the APIs needed for PWA functionality.
Using the PWA template
When creating a new Blazor WebAssembly app, you’re offered the option to add PWA features. In Visual Studio, the option is given as a checkbox in the project creation dialog:
If you’re creating the project on the command line, you can use the --pwa
flag. For example,
dotnet new blazorwasm --pwa -o MyNewProject
In both cases, you’re free to also use the “ASP.NET Core hosted” option if you wish, but don’t have to do so. PWA features are independent of how the app is hosted.
Installation and app manifest
When visiting an app created using the PWA template option, users have the option to install the app into their OS’s start menu, dock, or home screen.
The way this option is presented depends on the user’s browser. For example, when using desktop Chromium-based browsers such as Edge or Chrome, an Add button appears within the address bar:
On iOS, visitors can install the PWA using Safari’s Share button and its Add to Homescreen option. On Chrome for Android, users should tap the Menu button in the upper-right corner, then choose Add to Home screen.
Once installed, the app appears in its own window, without any address bar.
To customize the window’s title, color scheme, icon, or other details, see the file manifest.json
in your project’s wwwroot
directory. The schema of this file is defined by web standards. For detailed documentation, see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest.
Offline support
By default, apps created using the PWA template option have support for running offline. A user must first visit the app while they are online, then the browser will automatically download and cache all the resources needed to operate offline.
Important: Offline support is only enabled for published apps. It is not enabled during development. This is because it would interfere with the usual development cycle of making changes and testing them.
Warning: If you intend to ship an offline-enabled PWA, there are several important warnings and caveats you need to understand. These are inherent to offline PWAs, and not specific to Blazor. Be sure to read and understand these caveats before making assumptions about how your offline-enabled app will work.
To see how offline support works, first publish your app, and host it on a server supporting HTTPS. When you visit the app, you should be able to open the browser’s dev tools and verify that a Service Worker is registered for your host:
Additionally, if you reload the page, then on the Network tab you should see that all resources needed to load your page are being retrieved from the Service Worker or Memory Cache:
This shows that the browser is not dependent on network access to load your app. To verify this, you can either shut down your web server, or instruct the browser to simulate offline mode:
Now, even without access to your web server, you should be able to reload the page and see that your app still loads and runs. Likewise, even if you simulate a very slow network connection, your page will still load almost immediately since it’s loaded independently of the network.
To learn more about building PWAs with Blazor, check out the documentation.
Known issues
There are a few known issues with this release that you may run into:
-
When building a Blazor WebAssembly app using an older .NET Core SDK you may see the following build error:
error MSB4018: The "ResolveBlazorRuntimeDependencies" task failed unexpectedly. error MSB4018: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly '\BlazorApp1\obj\Debug\netstandard2.1\BlazorApp1.dll'. The system cannot find the file specified. error MSB4018: File name: '\BlazorApp1\obj\Debug\netstandard2.1\BlazorApp1.dll' error MSB4018: at System.Reflection.AssemblyName.nGetFileInformation(String s) error MSB4018: at System.Reflection.AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(String assemblyFile) error MSB4018: at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build.ResolveBlazorRuntimeDependencies.GetAssemblyName(String assemblyPath) error MSB4018: at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build.ResolveBlazorRuntimeDependencies.ResolveRuntimeDependenciesCore(String entryPoint, IEnumerable`1 applicationDependencies, IEnumerable`1 monoBclAssemblies) error MSB4018: at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build.ResolveBlazorRuntimeDependencies.Execute() error MSB4018: at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute() error MSB4018: at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.ExecuteInstantiatedTask(ITaskExecutionHost taskExecutionHost, TaskLoggingContext taskLoggingContext, TaskHost taskHost, ItemBucket bucket, TaskExecutionMode howToExecuteTask)
To address this issue, upgrade to version 3.1.102 or later of the .NET Core 3.1 SDK.
-
You may see the following warning when building from the command-line:
CSC : warning CS8034: Unable to load Analyzer assembly C:\Users\user\.nuget\packages\microsoft.aspnetcore.components.analyzers\3.1.0\analyzers\dotnet\cs\Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Analyzers.dll : Assembly with same name is already loaded
This issue will be fixed in a future update to the .NET Core SDK. To workaround this issue, add the
<DisableImplicitComponentsAnalyzers>true</DisableImplicitComponentsAnalyzers>
property to the project file. -
The following error may occur when publishing an ASP.NET Core hosted Blazor app with the .NET IL linker disabled:
An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (BlazorApp1.Server.deps.json) was not found
This error occurs when assemblies shared by the server and Blazor client project get removed during publish (see https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/19926).
To workaround this issue, ensure that you publish with the .NET IL linker enabled. To publish with the linker enabled:
- Publish using a Release build configuration:
dotnet publish -c Release
. The .NET IL linker is automatically run for Release builds, but not for Debug builds. - Don’t set
BlazorWebAssemblyEnableLinking
tofalse
in your client project file.
If you’re hitting issues running with the linker disabled, you may need to configure the linker to preserve code that is being called using reflection. See https://docs.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/blazor/configure-linker for details.
- Publish using a Release build configuration:
Feedback
We hope you enjoy the new features in this preview release of Blazor WebAssembly! Please let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub.
Thanks for trying out Blazor!
146 comments
https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/19752
There seems to be a nuget package missing -Step to reproduce:
Assuming latest SDL + template installed (VS2019 16.5.0 preview 5.0)
Create new Project
Select Blazor Template
Choose WASM, change Auth to individual user accounts, tick Hosted
Click Build
Expected
Build Succeeded
Actual
Same here. I can’t find that package in nuget.org.
It’s working now! 🙂
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Runtime/3.2.0-preview2.20159.2
Sorry about that! One of the packages was missed during publishing. Should be fixed now.
Keep it up! Loving Blazor so far! If this is the beginning I’m very excited about the future!
Thanks!
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the very descriptive post!
Great stuff here!
Just wanted to note the typos in the “Upgrade an existing project” section.
Your references to “Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAsssembly” have an extra s in WebAsssembly.
This caught me out when copy pasting!
Thanks.
Thanks Mitchell for pointing this out! Fixed.
Great! Updating right now.
I cannot find the package WebAssembly.JSInterop, but looking there is Microsoft.JSInterop.WebAssembly available on nuget (v3.2.0-preview2.20160.5) https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.JSInterop.WebAssembly/3.2.0-preview2.20160.5/
Thanks,
Yeah, that was another typo. Microsoft.JSInterop.WebAssembly is the package you want.
A huge thanks to Dan and Blazor team, for integrating Auth (IdentityServer & Azure B2C) with Blazor WASM.
This will now allow companies to consider building LoB Apps with Blazor WASM with full security.
Great job guys!
Thanks!
..Ben
Where can I find the source code for the Microsoft.Authentication.WebAssembly.Msal package?
Edit: I guess the source is here:
https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/tree/blazor-wasm/src/Components/WebAssembly/Authentication.Msal/src
https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/tree/blazor-wasm/src/Components/WebAssembly/WebAssembly.Authentication/src
Yup, that’s the correct branch and code location.
Hi Daniel,
To avoid confusion, is the IdentityServer specified in this blog post the same as https://github.com/IdentityServer/IdentityServer4/ ? If we have an already IdentityServer4 implementation I guess we should use steps specified in Authenticate using an existing OpenID Connect provider?
Best regards,
Mihai
Correct. I’ve added a link to https://identityserver.io to make this clearer.
Do you have plans for bundling?
Today big web apps have sometimes hundred of dependencies and having to download hundreds of dlls might be not the best idea.
Furthermore are there any plans for lazy loading and creating independent chunks for feature modules in bigger apps?
I also have same questions. Suppose we have an app that supports two types of users. Basic and PRO users.
After a user logs in and the client app determines what type of user she is, then we would like to decide what modules to load or not to load depending on the user type. For example, Basic users might be 80% of our users, so we don’t want 80% of users to load modules that only belong to PRO users (20%).
We could wait till the .Net 5 to be released for this feature, but on-demand and lazy loading are very critical on the success of our apps acceptance by general public.
Or perhaps MSFT could provide a sound guidelines that we can follow to break the app physically, especially for Mobile users, so we can achieve similar results.
Thanks!
..Ben
Adding support for lazy loading of app areas is on our backlog: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/5465. We don’t expect to get to it for the Blazor WebAssembly release in May, so the earliest we’d get to this is for .NET 5.
We think though that you may be surprised at how large your app needs to get before this becomes a problem. .NET IL is a compact format, so it takes a lot of app code before this becomes a problem. You can also use the .NET IL linker to remove unneeded from dependencies. If you’re hitting issues where your app is getting too large and you think splitting it up in this way would help please let us know as we’d like to understand better through concrete examples what large apps like this look like.
For full modularity support I would also suggest taking at the Oqtane project: https://www.oqtane.org/.
The loading times are already pretty long, takes 4-5 seconds on my machine. Not a big problem for something like an Office365 but for E-Commerce sites it could be better. I think one part of the success stories of react and angular is that there are big companies who use these frameworks for their own products, something that is still pending for Blazor afaik.
The problem is that no one will use Blazor, knowing that the initial download is more than 5 MB. They will use whatever they want – Angular, React, Vue, Svelte – and it doesn’t matter what synthetic speed tests show. Simply say: 5Mb – and a programmer will instantly choose a different framework.
The good news is that the download size for a default Blazor app is already much smaller than that! With .NET IL linking enabled the app is just barely 2MB. It will get a bit smaller with our next preview update.
Thanks for this lovely release – Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 2.
I have some issues though, I have the latest Visual Studio 2019 (Version 16.4.6)
So when I create a blazor webassembly project( as hosted) and then build it I get the following error:
Error MSB4018 The “ResolveTargetingPackAssets” task failed unexpectedly.
System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find a part of the path ‘C:\Program Files\dotnet\packs\NETStandard.Library.Ref\2.1.0\data\FrameworkList.xml’.
at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
at System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy, Boolean useLongPath, Boolean checkHost)
at System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize)
at System.Xml.XmlDownloadManager.GetStream(Uri uri, ICredentials credentials, IWebProxy proxy, RequestCachePolicy cachePolicy)
at System.Xml.XmlUrlResolver.GetEntity(Uri absoluteUri, String role, Type ofObjectToReturn)
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.FinishInitUriString()
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl..ctor(String uriStr, XmlReaderSettings settings, XmlParserContext context, XmlResolver uriResolver)
at System.Xml.XmlReaderSettings.CreateReader(String inputUri, XmlParserContext inputContext)
at System.Xml.XmlReader.Create(String inputUri, XmlReaderSettings settings, XmlParserContext inputContext)
The folder C:\Program Files\dotnet\packs\NETStandard.Library.Ref\2.1.0 is also empty.
Very strange, I have never seen this before
Any ideas?
I will replay to my own question 🙂
After I did a repair (running “dotnet-sdk-3.1.102-win-x64.exe”), the strange error was gone. 🙂
Cool, I’m glad you were able to resolve this!
Hi
New update include IdentityServer is very good news for me, I try new project template immediately, But when I add Identity Scaffold to override login page,
Project Client theme is all disapper and show An unhandled error has occurred. Reload 🗙 without any message in console , but login page show correctly.
Any Idea for this error?
Hi Shang. Thanks for trying out the new Blazor authentication support! There may very well still be some rough edges when using the Identity scaffolder with your Blazor app. To ensure the issue you are seeing gets addressed, could you please please file an issue on GitHub (https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues) with the detailed steps to reproduce the problem? That way we can get the right folks from our engineering team involved. We appreciate your patience on this one!
Hi Shang! Did you resolve this problem, I got the same after Scaffolding Identity Pages
Still needs lazy loading of routes to be viable in a production scenario of a site with hundreds of pages, otherwise the first load size just keeps growing and growing. Given that this is not happening until .NET 5, this release is little more than a show case.
Hi James. Yup, it’s on our backlog: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/5465. We just haven’t got to it yet. The reason we haven’t prioritized it higher is that we believe for most apps the download size will be dominated by the size of the runtime and core framework libraries. The size impact of each additional page is typically pretty small, so lazy loading often won’t have much of an impact on the initial load. That said, we understand that apps can get really big and this is something we play to address in a future release.
I think you guys need to check again because your target audience is Enterprise LOB for the most part with this. The upfront is still way to large for publicly facing websites (to say nothing of SEO which right now appears to be a non-starter). We were considering using Blazor for our logged on user area until we realized this major issue.
We have an Angular 9.1 website. It’s initial load with all of the libraries we use (Bootstrap, CSS, SignalR, whatever the requested page the user asks for for kendo ui) + our content is about 1.2 megs gziped to the user (not counting images etc). The entire size of the site with all pages is about 31 megs gziped. It isn’t a huge site, think pluralsite size.
Now, I realize that binary compilation of Blazor will make it smaller, but gzip will bring it pretty close to what Blazor will produce.
In Blazor, your target audience is going to be faced with asking people to download 25 or megs of stuff just to see first render, or not use Blazor.
And worse, they’ll happily code along, then after many days and weeks, realize it’s getting huge and realize that there is no way to fix it and be faced with a choice of waiting until November or tossing Blazor and never touching it again and being really angry at Microsoft.
This is exactly the type of decision making that gets Microsoft in trouble. You’re use cases are out of wack. (well that and reinventing everything over and over again like Skype, .NET Core nea .net 5, WPF, Silverlight, UWP, on and on causing you to fall behind in the market and lose one you owned in Skype to Zoom, an inferior product, but Skype hasn’t actually improved at all to the end user since Microsoft bought it…)
You guys need to seriously rethink the decision not to get this into this release. If you don’t, you’re at best going to have a bunch of angry devs, and more likely going to have a ton of devs that decide to use something else for another 6 months of Microsoft falling behind without an SPA. (and this is after you lost the lead from knockout, and Durandal to angular,react,vue in the first place because of reinventing the wheel instead of incrementally improving Durandal and making it a real product within MS since it’s still better today than Angular 9 is in many ways. Yes I know it was done by Rob, but he’s now an MS employee or was, and you could have easily brought all of it in house and Angular lost it’s lead to React and begat Vue because they decided to do a complete rewrite instead of incremental improvement to where they are now with the same consequences as every time MS does this.)
And this is emblematic of the problem with Blazor Mobile. Instead of focusing on your true competitor, Flutter, you’re obsessed with yesterday’s tech and copying React Native so we’re getting wrappers around Xamarin, instead of a native rendering engine that works across mobile, web, and desktop like Flutter. If the effort was focused where it needs to be, the Xamarin infrastructure and Azure cloud for doing iOS compiles and remote simulators so that windows devs didn’t have to own a mac, would have been a huge advantage and would have smoked flutter and created a compelling story. Instead we’re getting something that anyone in the space isn’t asking for. Sanderson obviously saw this because his POC on the subject used the Flutter rendering engine with Blazor. But then somewhere along the lines it got hijacked into the mess it is, and that has enormous consequences to the success of Windows as a whole, but Duo and Neo specifically. And given that Windows has been given one last shot moving it all under Surface’s boss, this should be enormously worrying.
It’s really sad to see Blazor’s enormous potential squandered, when it could have been Microsoft’s ticket back into end user UX/UI development and freed Microsoft from the handcuffs of xaml which is enormously hated based on the surveys from devs.