Setting up the Blazor WebAssembly Client

Overview

Blazor WebAssembly is a .NET implementation of WebAssembly technology. This technology allows us to run compiled code in the browser without installing any special plugins.

A detailed description of Blazor is beyond the scope of this course. But we'll go into enough details to set up a SignalR client inside it. Also, an important thing to remember is that there are two distinct types of Blazor—the WebAssembly and Blazor Servers. The former type allows us to compile our code into WebAssembly and run it in the browser, which we need. Despite having the same syntax, the latter type is set up differently. There’s no compiled code on our web page. Instead, JavaScript is generated from our code when we build our application. And then, that JavaScript interacts with the code on our server.

Steps to set up a WebAssembly client

The only useful thing to know about Blazor Server in our context is that it uses SignalR for this communication.

Step 1: Create a BlazorClient project

So, let’s now go ahead and create a Blazor WebAssembly application. We'll do so by executing the ...