You're reading from Blazor WebAssembly by Example, 2e Use practical projects to start building web apps with .NET 7, Blazor WebAssembly, and C#

Product type Paperback

Published in Feb 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781803241852

Length 438 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Tools

.NET

Concepts

Front End Web Development

Author (1):

Toi B. Wright

View More author details

Table of Contents (15) Chapters

Preface

1. Introduction to Blazor WebAssembly

2. Building Your First Blazor WebAssembly Application FREE CHAPTER

3. Debugging and Deploying a Blazor WebAssembly App

4. Building a Modal Dialog Using Templated Components

5. Building a Local Storage Service Using JavaScript Interoperability (JS Interop)

6. Building a Weather App as a Progressive Web App (PWA)

7. Building a Shopping Cart Using Application State

8. Building a Kanban Board Using Events

9. Uploading and Reading an Excel File

10. Using Azure Active Directory to Secure a Blazor WebAssembly Application

11. Building a Task Manager Using ASP.NET Web API

12. Building an Expense Tracker Using the EditForm Component

13. Other Books You May Enjoy

14. Index

What is WebAssembly?

WebAssembly is a binary instruction format that allows code written in high-level languages, such as C#, to run on the browser at near-native speed. To run .NET binaries in a web browser, it uses a version of the .NET runtime that has been compiled to WebAssembly. You can think of it as executing natively compiled code in a browser.

WebAssembly is an open standard developed by a W3C Community Group. It was originally announced in 2015, and the first browser that supported it was released in 2017.

WebAssembly goals

When WebAssembly was originally being developed, there were four main design goals for the project. This is a list of the original goals for WebAssembly:

Fast and efficient
Safe
Open
Don’t break the web

WebAssembly is fast and efficient. It is designed to allow developers to write code in any language that can then be compiled to run in the browser. Since the code is compiled, it is fast and performs at near-native speed.

WebAssembly is safe. It does not allow direct interaction with the browser’s DOM. Instead, it runs in its own memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. You must use JavaScript interop to interact with the DOM. The project in Chapter 5, Building a Local Storage Service Using JavaScript Interoperability (JS interop), will teach you how to use JavaScript interop.

WebAssembly is open. Although it is a low-level assembly language, it can be edited and debugged by hand.

WebAssembly didn’t break the web. It is a web standard that is designed to work with other web technologies. Also, WebAssembly modules can access the same Web APIs that are accessible from JavaScript.

Overall, WebAssembly was able to meet all of the original goals and rapidly gained support from all of the modern browsers.

WebAssembly support

As mentioned earlier, WebAssembly runs on all modern browsers, including mobile browsers. As you can see from the following table, all current versions of the most popular browsers are compatible with WebAssembly:

Browser	Version
Microsoft Edge	Current
Mozilla Firefox, including Android	Current
Google Chrome, including Android	Current
Safari, including iOS	Current
Opera, including Android	Current
Microsoft Internet Explorer	Not Supported

Table 1.2: WebAssembly browser compatibility

IMPORTANT NOTE

Microsoft Internet Explorer is no longer supported by Microsoft as of June 15, 2022. It does not support WebAssembly and will never support WebAssembly.

WebAssembly is a web standard that allows developers to run code written in any language in the browser. It is supported by all modern browsers.

Now that we have discussed the benefits of using the Blazor framework and compared the various hosting models, it’s time to start developing using the Blazor WebAssembly framework. However, before we can get started, you need to set up your PC.