MusicFestival Blazor WebAssembly site!

While we're waiting for the official .NET Core support for Episerver to come out (my beta invite must have been lost in the e-mail), I've ported the excellent MusicFestival SPA to run on Blazor WebAssembly - so you can have SPA templates running purely on .NET Core and Blazor with Episerver CMS today.

What is Blazor and why should you care?

Blazor is a free and open source web framework from Microsoft that allows us to create rich and interactive front-ends using C# and .NET Core. The application is compiled to WebAssembly and served by the browser. 

This enables us to create a dynamic front-end totally independent of Javascript, which means you can say good bye to the ever changing chaos of Babel, Webpack, Linters and the several billion files in your node_modules folder. 

I can't speak for all developers, obviously, but after working with AngularJS, ReactJS and Vue the past 6-7 years - the simplicity of Blazor is very refreshing. While it is still in preview and parts of it are a little rough around the edges, it gets new releases frequently and Microsoft definitely puts a lot of effort into it. 

How does it work with Episerver?

Since Blazor requires .NET Core, the application needs to have it's own project - but the compiled WebAssembly-application can be hosted anywhere. 

For this site, I've set it up so that the Blazor application is published to a subfolder on the Episerver site whenever the project is built. Then there are URL-rewrite rules in place that rewrites all requests to the subdirectory, with exceptions for requests to Content Delivery API and the Episerver-interface. 

Blazor's built in router doesn't support loading components dynamically from routes that are unknown at compile time, so I made a custom router for this that replaces the default. 

I'll make another blog post or two covering the specifics of working with Episerver and Blazor, but until then, please check it out on Github:

https://github.com/jtonvang/musicfestival-blazor