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Microsoft Blazor Server Side

by Jason Walker on 21 January 2026

Microsoft Blazor Server Side
4:52

Is your C# team missing one of the most straightforward paths to interactive web apps?

Microsoft Blazor Server Side

For years, modern web development has been dominated by complex front-end ecosystems - React, Angular, Vue, and an ever-expanding constellation of Node, npm, bundlers, and TypeScript tooling. While these stacks deliver real power, they can also make delivery more fragmented, expensive and difficult to sustain for smaller teams. Crossing the HTTP boundary from type-safe to untyped code can add friction, especially when those boundaries mirror team boundaries.

But what if there was another way - a way that let you build fully interactive, modern web applications using just C# and .NET?

Enter Blazor

Blazor is ASP.NET Core's UI framework for building interactive web apps using C# and Razor components. In modern .NET (8+), Blazor's "Blazor Web App" model supports multiple render modes (including server-side and WebAssembly) within the same application, so you can choose the right trade-off per page or component.

While WebAssembly rightly grabs headlines as the future of web apps and a potential disruptor for containers, it’s Blazor Server that quietly delivers exceptional practicality right now. It offers simplicity, maturity, and surprising performance — a combination that makes it particularly attractive for organisations that already live in the .NET ecosystem.

The Blazor Circuit - Keeping It Simple

In a server-side Blazor app, your component logic executes on the server. Each user session has a circuit, which represents that user's interactive session on the server (for example, opening multiple tabs creates multiple circuits).

User interactions are sent to the server over SignalR (typically WebSockets when available, with fallbacks depending on the environment). The server processes events and sends back minimal UI updates (a render batch/diff) rather than reloading the whole page.

This model eliminates the need to build and maintain a separate front-end codebase or REST API. External integration issues asside your code runs as a single .NET solution — one codebase, one build, one deployment.

A Single Stack - Less Complexity

Pair server-side Blazor with a mature component library like MudBlazor, and you have an elegant, productive development stack:

  • One language: C# for the UI and server logic.
  • One framework: Modern ASP.NET Core (.NET 10 is the current LTS at the time of writing).
  • One build process: No mandatory Node toolchain for the core UI (you can still use JS/CSS tooling if you choose).
  • One hosting target: Standard ASP.NET Core hosting - on-prem, containers, or cloud PaaS.

For organisations with strong C# skills but limited JavaScript depth, this can be a genuine productivity win - faster delivery, simpler hiring and upskilling, and a more coherent long-term maintenance story.

Performance and Scale - Real Trade-offs, Manageable with Discipline

Blazor Server can perform very well for many line-of-business and departmental apps - but it is stateful on the server. Capacity depends on:

  • How much per-user state you retain in memory per circuit.
  • How frequently you re-render components (and how much work each render does).
  • Network latency and connection stability between browser and server.
  • How you handle reconnection, circuit retention, and resource cleanup.

Microsoft provides explicit guidance on performance, diagnostics, and memory management for server-side Blazor apps. Treat those as required reading before you commit to high-concurrency scenarios.

Super Testable (In the Ways That Matter)

Blazor has strong testing options:

  • Component unit tests with bUnit - fast, deterministic, and CI-friendly.
  • End-to-end tests using browser automation (for example, Playwright for .NET) when you want to validate real user flows.

The result is a test strategy that looks much more like "normal .NET testing" and less like stitching together multiple testing ecosystems.

When It Shines (and When to Think Twice)

Server-side Blazor tends to shine for:

  • Internal apps, admin consoles, dashboards, and forms-heavy workflows.
  • Apps where you want tight integration with ASP.NET Core security and data access.
  • Teams that want a coherent C#-centric stack without maintaining a separate SPA and API solely for the UI.

Think twice (or plan carefully) if you need:

  • Offline-first behaviour.
  • Extremely high-latency or frequently-disconnected clients.
  • Very large public internet scale with strict stateless scaling assumptions.

Why It Matters

The industry often chases the “next big thing” — WebAssembly, container orchestration, micro-frontends. Yet for many real-world solutions, simplicity is the winning strategy. Blazor Server provides that simplicity without sacrificing interactivity or maintainability.

If Blazor fits your needs and you have a team familiar with MVC.NET and C# you have an opportunity to deliver inteactive web sites with real cost savings.

 
Topics: Software Development .Net Core

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