Microsoft is bringing .NET to Browser based Web Apps with an Experimental Project

[AlTech]

Microsoft is bringing .NET to Browser based Web Apps with an experimental project called "Blazor".

 

Blazor uses C# as well as Razor and HTML to run in modern browsers using WebAssembly. This is the first time browser based web apps could be properly made with C#.

 

100% No Javascript required .

 

Quote

Why use .NET for browser apps?

Web development has improved in many ways over the years but building modern web applications still poses challenges. Using .NET in the browser offers many advantages that can help make web development easier and more productive:

• Stable and consistent: .NET offers standard APIs, tools, and build infrastructure across all .NET platforms that are stable, feature rich, and easy to use.
• Modern innovative languages: .NET languages like C# and F# make programming a joy and keep getting better with innovative new language features.
• Industry leading tools: The Visual Studio product family provides a great .NET development experience on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• Fast and scalable: .NET has a long history of performance, reliability, and security for web development on the server. Using .NET as a full-stack solution makes it easier to build fast, reliable and secure applications.

 

Quote

Blazor is based on existing web technologies like HTML and CSS, but you use C# and Razor syntax instead of JavaScript to build composable web UI. Note that it is not a way of deploying existing UWP or Xamarin mobile apps in the browser. To see what this looks like in action, check out Steve Sanderson’s prototype demo at NDC Oslo last year or his prototype demo for the ASP.NET Community Standup. You can also try out a simple live Blazor app running as a static site.

 

And of course this is enabled by a Mono .NET Runtime for WebAssembly.

 

Quote

Running .NET in the browser is made possible by WebAssembly, a new web standard for a “portable, size- and load-time-efficient format suitable for compilation to the web.” WebAssembly enables fundamentally new ways to write web apps. Code compiled to WebAssembly can run in any browser at native speeds. This is the foundational piece needed to build a .NET runtime that can run in the browser. No plugins or transpilation needed. You run normal .NET assemblies in the browser using a WebAssembly based .NET runtime.

Last August, our friends on Microsoft’s Xamarin team announced their plans to bring a .NET runtime (Mono) to the web using WebAssembly and have been making steady progress. The Blazor project builds on their work to create a rich client-side single page application framework written in .NET.

 

This seems really cool. The only thing is I'd like Microsoft to make something like Electron so that it could use this with .NET Standard 2.0 and Blazor instead of having to jump around hoops to get it to work with electron.

 

And the cherry on top of the cake is that this Blazor project is open source.

 

So yeah. Nice work .

 

Source:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/02/06/blazor-experimental-project/

[8uhbbhu8]

Ooooo that's really nice! A good replacement for javascript has been needed for YEARS. 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

Fuckin dark night theme

[AlTech]

3 minutes ago, Pohernori said:

Fuckin dark night theme

Soz . I tried just now to fix it but idk what's going on.

[WereCat]

Awww yisss! Get rid of Java script now!

[Hiitchy]

Let's just hope they've done extensive work on finding and patching any security issues with the dot net framework before this launches. I mean I know how bad Java was, but I'm trying to welcome new things and get rid of this stale coffee.

[MyName13]

Does this mean that we will have a new language every month instead of a new framework?

[AlTech]

21 minutes ago, Hiitchy said:

Let's just hope they've done extensive work on finding and patching any security issues with the dot net framework before this launches. I mean I know how bad Java was, but I'm trying to welcome new things and get rid of this stale coffee.

To be clear, they're not running .NET Framework in the browser. They're running .NET languages with a .NET Core related runtime in the browser.

[AlwaysFSX]

10 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

To be clear, they're not running .NET Framework in the browser. They're running .NET languages with a .NET Core related runtime in the browser.

Does this mean I won't get a notification every time I go to a site that I need to update my .NET libraries?

[EG!]

I like using TypeScript with frameworks like Angular.

I wonder if this will become a trend maybe Oracle can follow with a Java version

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, 8uhbbhu8 said:

Ooooo that's really nice! A good replacement for javascript has been needed for YEARS. 

 

59 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Awww yisss! Get rid of Java script now!

Just to be clear, that's not what this is.

 

That's what WASM (Web Assembly) is, which this is running on top of. WASM can be compiled from practically any language, so this looks like it's just a .NET C# JIT runtime, running in WASM.

 

And I really don't understand what people's problems with JavaScript are. In terms of language ideosyncracies it's not any worse than C#, and in terms of security you're going to have the exact same issues with WASM or .NET as you have with JavaScript...

[leadeater]

37 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

And I really don't understand what people's problems with JavaScript are. In terms of language ideosyncracies it's not any worse than C#, and in terms of security you're going to have the exact same issues with WASM or .NET as you have with JavaScript...

Well I can name something that genuinely is a right pain in the ass, Java. Nothing is more annoying and terrifying than contemplating upgrading your java runtime because you just know that Java application you use for a critical service is going to break because something special was used or Java security gets changed and all you get is the Java sad face.

 

I won't name the application but even the software vendor recommends to never update Java beyond the included runtime redistribute that comes with the software, 100% hit rate of it breaking when upgrading just to see if it does so far. It's also not some janky software company either, it's the market leader in it's field.

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Well I can name something that genuinely is a right pain in the ass, Java. Nothing is more annoying and terrifying than contemplating upgrading your java runtime because you just know that Java application you use for a critical service is going to break because something special was used or Java security gets changed and all you get is the Java sad face.

 

I won't name the application but even the software vendor recommends to never update Java beyond the included runtime redistribute that comes with the software, 100% hit rate of it breaking when upgrading just to see if it does so far. It's also not some janky software company either, it's the market leader in it's field.

Yes, but JavaScript is not Java. Beside the name "Java" in the name, and being both programming languages, they are not related. They are different languages.

[AlTech]

2 hours ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Does this mean I won't get a notification every time I go to a site that I need to update my .NET libraries?

yes. Website owners would be responsible for dealing with the .NET libraries used.

 

15 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Yes, but JavaScript is not Java. Beside the name "Java" in the name, and being both programming languages, they are not related. They are different languages.

Yup. JS is the unofficial name. The official technical name is ECMAScript.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Well I can name something that genuinely is a right pain in the ass, Java. Nothing is more annoying and terrifying than contemplating upgrading your java runtime because you just know that Java application you use for a critical service is going to break because something special was used or Java security gets changed and all you get is the Java sad face.

 

I won't name the application but even the software vendor recommends to never update Java beyond the included runtime redistribute that comes with the software, 100% hit rate of it breaking when upgrading just to see if it does so far. It's also not some janky software company either, it's the market leader in it's field.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that it's the PaperMF client.

[Sniperfox47]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

~snip~

vv

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Yes, but JavaScript is not Java. Beside the name "Java" in the name, and being both programming languages, they are not related. They are different languages.

Based on the above is it safe to say that a big part of why JavaScript gets so much hate is because a ton of people have no effing clue what it is and just go "Everyone else hates it, so I guess it's bad!"

[AlTech]

1 minute ago, Sniperfox47 said:

vv

Based on the above is it safe to say that a big part of why JavaScript gets so much hate is because a ton of people have no effing clue what it is and just go "Everyone else hates it, so I guess it's bad!"

I dislike Javascript because it's difficult to make classes and do OOP stuff. It doesn't use proper types instead opting exclusively for vars which is rather silly imho.

 

It's hard to make stuff multi-threaded in JS.

 

It's just not nearly as scalable as C# or other languages. It's just a real pain to deal with and frankly I'd use rather use almost any other language for web apps.

[cluelessgenius]

6 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

This is the first time browser based web apps could be properly made with C#.

"properly" ...right.. judging by their efforts to bring c# to iot im gonna stay ..lets say sceptical for now

[AlTech]

12 minutes ago, cluelessgenius said:

"properly" ...right.. judging by their efforts to bring c# to iot im gonna stay ..lets say sceptical for now

C# can currently easily be run on IoT, servers, desktops & laptops & tablets & phones, Xbox Ones, HoloGraphic devices, Windows 10 Team devices (think SurfaceHub), Mac, Linux, IOS, Android etc.

 

Most Unity Games use C#. Most Windows 10 UWP apps use C#. Most Xbox Apps use C#.

 

C# has easily been able to run using ASP.NET (and ASP.NET Core) in browsers for use on Servers which host a service or product.

 

This is the key point: Prior to this, C# hadn't been ported to Web Apps for use on Client based systems. It was always for server based web systems.

 

C# is a very stable, reliable and performant language and isn't something I'd worry about being unstable.

[Sniperfox47]

11 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I dislike Javascript because it's difficult to make classes and do OOP stuff. It doesn't use proper types instead opting exclusively for vars which is rather silly imho.

 

It's hard to make stuff multi-threaded in JS.

 

It's just not nearly as scalable as C# or other languages. It's just a real pain to deal with and frankly I'd use rather use almost any other language for web apps.

If you hate it that much, you can just use bridge.NET or JSIL and compile your C# code to JS and never have to touch JS itself. Or use Pyjs if you don't want to be tied to Microsoft frameworks.

 

I get that JavaScript is not a crazy feature rich language and does have performance problems, but it has a purpose and it serves it. 

 

I understand it not being a primary language choice. I just don't understand some of the aggressive hate it gets.

[cluelessgenius]

5 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

C# can currently easily be run on IoT, servers, desktops & laptops & tablets & phones, Xbox Ones, HoloGraphic devices, Windows 10 Team devices (think SurfaceHub), Mac, Linux, IOS, Android etc.

 

Most Unity Games use C#. Most Windows 10 UWP apps use C#. Most Xbox Apps use C#.

 

C# has easily been able to run using ASP.NET (and ASP.NET Core) in browsers for use on Servers which host a service or product.

 

This is the key point: Prior to this, C# hadn't been ported to Web Apps for use on Client based systems. It was always for server based web systems.

 

C# is a very stable, reliable and performant language and isn't something I'd worry about being unstable.

well fine but it definitly depends on what one considers "properly". there still alot of issues with windows iot and UWP in that regard

[Sniperfox47]

7 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

This is the key point: Prior to this, C# hadn't been ported to Web Apps for use on Client based systems. It was always for server based web systems.

 

C# is a very stable, reliable and performant language and isn't something I'd worry about being unstable.

Because there is literally no reason to port it to a different language... Either just compile your .net code into JavaScript or into WASM. Why bother running the whole runtime framework on top of another VM.

[AlTech]

2 minutes ago, cluelessgenius said:

well fine but it definitly depends on what one considers "properly". there still alot of issues with windows iot and UWP in that regard

Well yes but C# (the language) is not nearly the primary issue here.

 

1 minute ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Because there is literally no reason to port it to a different language

?

 

I'm very confused.

1 minute ago, Sniperfox47 said:

... Either just compile your .net code into JavaScript or into WASM. Why bother running the whole runtime framework on top of another VM.

What are you talking about lol?

 

I was saying that C# has been possible on Web Systems using native C# code (not transpiled or anything) but it was (and is) used for servers hosting websites etc.

 

Now it's going to be possible to use C# to build web apps running in browsers rather than just web services running on servers.

[Sniperfox47]

11 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

?

 

I'm very confused.

What are you talking about lol?

 

I was saying that C# has been possible on Web Systems using native C# code (not transpiled or anything) but it was (and is) used for servers hosting websites etc.

 

Now it's going to be possible to use C# to build web apps running in browsers rather than just web services running on servers.

You can already use C# the language to build web apps, even using 99% of .NET, as long as you use a bridge to convert it to JavaScript (I.e bridge.NET or JSIL).

 

What possible reason is there to run C# bytecode inside of a .NET runtime inside of a WASM VM... To save the little bit of extra code you'd need for jailing and platform specific code to compile it directly into WASM?

 

Also just want to point out that C# code, particularly that from .NET is *not* native code. It's an intermediate bytecode. C# is a garbage collected language, and in 99% of situations gets handled by a runtime on the host system (usually .NET or mono) which JITs it to native code and handles garbage collection.

 

P.S. also want to point out on the note of performance and stability that .NET garbage collection is one of the bigger reasons why Unity games have had such a terrible history with performance issues in the past...

[AlTech]

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

You can already use C# the language to build web apps, even using 99% of .NET, as long as you use a bridge to convert it to JavaScript (I.e bridge.NET or JSIL).

You're assuming people go out of their way to use Javascript and worship it.

I can tell you from experience that JS is only used by a fair few people because they can't use a different language.

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

What possible reason is there to run C# bytecode inside of a .NET runtime inside of a WASM VM... To save the little bit of extra code you'd need for jailing and platform specific code to compile it directly into WASM?

Programming in C# is substantially more pleasant than JS. And besides it's probably gonna end up being more performant thanks to WASM.

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

 

Also just want to point out that C# code, particularly that from .NET is *not* native code. It's an intermediate bytecode. C# is a garbage collected language, and in 99% of situations gets handled by a runtime on the host system (usually .NET or mono) which JITs it to native code and handles garbage collection.

Well yes but I meant actual C# code and not transpiled code or something like that.

[porina]

End user perspective: yay, another way to run stuff I probably didn't want. I know it is not good or evil, but how it is used can be. Will this enable more ways for advertising to be creative in getting your attention or otherwise extracting value?