I’ve been an ASP.NET developer for over 17 years now. I love working with ASP.NET Core and the C# language. But there was always an element missing for me. . . .
Since I was young, I’ve enjoyed building web UIs. When I was 15, my best friend and I decided to build a website about the Quake games we enjoyed playing. He built the backend while I built the UI. I remember spending hours and days creating nested tables and inline styles to create the look we wanted for the site. This seems torturous now, but I really loved it at the time. Throughout my resulting career, I’ve really enjoyed building the client-side experience, but this has always taken me away from C# and ASP.NET Core. Instead, I’ve learned JavaScript and various frameworks and tooling that are popular in that ecosystem. While I enjoyed JavaScript, I really wanted to be using my favorite language, C#, when building client-side web applications.
Then one day in February 2018, I stumbled across a video of Steve Sanderson at NDC Oslo 2017 (https://youtu.be/MiLAE6HMr10). In this talk, he presented an experiment he had built that took a portable .NET run time called Dot Net Anywhere and compiled it to a format called WebAssembly. He used this as a base to create a framework that allowed client-side web applications to be built using Razor (a mix of C#, HTML, and CSS) that ran entirely in the browser. He called it Blazor.