Eilon Lipton on Blazor Desktop - Episode 166

This week, Eilon Lipton is joining the podcast! Eilon is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft. Eilon has been entrenched in the .NET world since it publicly came out. He started out as an intern at Microsoft on the ASP.NET team in 2000 and then came back to Microsoft in a full-time position in 2002 and has been with the company ever since. Some of his career highlights include working on the update panel control, seeing technologies like Blazor come around and bringing C# off of the server and into the client space as a manager of ASP.NET, and working on the first versions of NVC and Web API as an engineer and engineering manager.

In this episode, Eilon is discussing the ins and outs of Blazor Desktop — which is currently 100% of what he's been working on. He takes listeners on a deep-dive of Blazor Desktop, sharing what they need to know in anticipation of .NET 6 and the GA drop of Visual Studio 2022 coming out. He also touches on WPF, WinForms, MAUI, and the 2021 DEVintersection Conference.

Topics of Discussion:

[:39] About The Azure DevOps Podcast, Clear Measure; the new video podcast Architect Tips; and Jeffrey's offer to speak at virtual user groups.

[1:15] About today's episode with Eilon Lipton.

[1:30] Jeffrey welcomes Eilon to the podcast.

[1:45] Eilon shares highlights from his career and how he first arrived at Microsoft.

[4:54] About today's topic of conversation with Eilon: Blazor Desktop.

[5:45] What Blazor Desktop means for developers.

[5:55] Eilon shares his vision for Blazor Desktop.

[9:02] Eilon gives a run-through of the options available for Blazor Desktop.

[10:49] What's the relationship between the Blazor web view control and Web view 2?

[12:52] Does the Blazor web view give you more access to the operating system than a browser normally does?

[15:05] Is there a useable preview that's coming out soon for .NET MAUI?

[17:51] When you download the GA of VS '22, is the latest MAUI going to be ready to go or do you need to download a subsequent installer?

[19:05] With Blazor Desktop, is there a default wrapper or does it ask you to pick a WPF shell or WinForms shell? What is the normal path if you just want one Blazor application to be Windows native?

[24:18] A word from The Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[24:50] Eilon speaks about the development environment for Blazor Desktop.

[28:08] Are they still working toward getting an actual relational database to be possible in the browser sandbox?

[30:26] Is there any special workflow with how Eilon and his team work on Blazor Desktop?

[34:07] Would it be possible to

[38:08] In Blazor Desktop, is it native UI controls or web widgets that are rendered?

[39:36] Is Blazor mobile bindings carrying forward into MAUI? Is it intended to be used so that it feels more like a mobile app over there vs. on Windows or Mac, looking more like how your web application would look?

[42:50] Is it part of the Blazor Desktop vision to extend it to WinForms or WPF?

[46:58] Where to find more information about Blazor Desktop online and how to get in touch with Eilon.

[49:16] About the upcoming DEVintersection Conference.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Architect Tips — New video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!

Jeffrey Palermo's YouTube

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

DEVintersection Conference — Dec. 7th‒9th in Las Vegas, Nevada (Use discount code: PALERMO)