I'm Speaking! TrailBlazor Conference 2025

On June 26th, 2025, Devessence Inc., in partnership with Syncfusion, will host the TrailBlazor Conference, a free one-day virtual event showcasing the spirit of excitement and innovation within the .NET developer ecosystem featuring Blazor, .NET MAUI, .NET Aspire, and Oqtane. 

We have lined up some amazing speakers for the event, including members of the Blazor, .NET MAUI & .NET Aspire product teams from Microsoft, as well as many other respected leaders and peers of mine within the .NET community. 

I'll be doing the session, "Zero to Blazor Apps with GitHub Copilot," at 1PM ET (5PM UTC) which showcases using GitHub Copilot to accelerate and enhance developing Blazor applications. Registration is open at https://trailblazor.net - sign up today!

Check Out My YouTube Channel! 'The Eclectic Dev'

As technology has evolved over the years, so has the way we have to share information with the global engineering community. To that end I created another way to reach out and share software engineering and technology information through, 'The Eclectic Dev' my YouTube channel.

Come along with me and learn about the endless world of software engineering! I'll explore a wide variety of topics. Specializing primarily in web, .NET, and cloud related technologies, I'll journey these areas and beyond to many eclectic topics of interest to share knowledge with the wider global technology community.

Check it out by clicking on the channel logo below, and please subscribe to stay tuned for a host of eclectic topics and as an extension of this blog which began over 17 years ago!

How to Nest Blazor's .razor Files in Visual Studio Code

When working with Blazor in Visual Studio Code, you may encounter some nuanced differences from working in Visual Studio, and would like greater feature parity. One such feature is the default file nesting as shown below from Visual Studio when it comes to Razor component files:

Visual Studio Code has the capability to nest files, but by default Blazor's files are not nested and appear in parallel. 

To update/fix this, we can update the 'File Nesting Patterns' in the Command Palette.

Open the Command Palette in Visual Studio Code by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P (PC) and then add the following search string for direct access: 

@id:explorer.fileNesting.patterns

Select 'Add Item' with the key: 

*.razor

and use the following Value:

${capture}.razor.cs, ${capture}.razor.css, ${capture}.razor.scss, ${capture}.razor.less, ${capture}.razor.js, ${capture}.razor.ts

You can add any applicable file extensions to the list above as needed. At this point you can close the settings and see the Blazor files nested correctly:

How to Enable 'Hey Code!' Voice Interactivity for GitHub Copilot Chat

With all the smart devices around the house that can be queued with the likes of 'Hey Google!' wouldn't it be great if we could queue up GitHub Copilot in the same manner either for ease of use or required for accessibility needs? Thankfully this isn't too difficult to configure in Visual Studio Code. Once configured you can say, 'Hey Code!' and use a voice prompt to interact with GitHub Copilot chat.

GitHub Copilot Chat 'Hey Code!' Configuration Steps

1. Open the Command Palette via Ctrl+Shift+P or F1
2. Type in 'accessibility' to access configuration options and select, 'Preferences: Open Accessibility Settings'

3. Add 'voice' to the configuration filter and select 'Accessibility > Voice: Keyword Activation'

4. Select an option for where Copilot Chat interacts with you after saying aloud, 'Hey Code!' in the IDE:

• chatInView: start a voice chat session in the chat view (i.e. the Copilot Chat main window)
• quickChat: start a voice chat session in the quick chat (i.e. Command Palette input)
• inlineChat: start a voice chat session in the active editor if possible (i.e. inline Copilot Chat dialog)
• chatInContext: start a voice chat session in the active editor or view depending on keyboard focus (i.e. if the current cursor is focused within code in a file, the inline Copilot Chat dialog is used, and if the active cursor is in the Copilot Chat main window this will be used to capture the dialog)

My preference is to use chatInContext as it will toggle inline vs window chat based on current focus, but play around with the options to see which is best for you.

A quick way to access these settings once configured is to press the microphone icon in the bottom task bar of Visual Studio Code which will immediately pull up these same settings to modify directly.

Now try it out and say, "Hey Code! Help me create a new Blazor web application!"

How to Fix the GitHub Copilot Chat Error: 'Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'split')'

If you're using GitHub Copilot Chat within Visual Studio code, you may begin to see an error unexpectedly after an IDE update that reads as follows when using Copilot Chat:

Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'split')

This is caused by the Copilot Chat extension requiring a reload which can be seen from the extensions menu:

Once selecting, 'Reload Required,' Visual Studio Code will reload, and Copilot Chat will begin working as expected again.

Blazor WebAssembly Lazy Loading Changes from .NET 7 to .NET 8

Lazy Loading is an essential tool used in web client development to defer loading of resources until requested by the user, as opposed to loading everything up-front which is expensive. Blazor has had the ability to lazy load Razor Class Libraries for the last several versions of .NET, but there are some updates in .NET 8 that aren't well documented.

To not be completely repetitive, here are the basic steps for implementing lazy loading in your Blazor WebAssembly application direct from the Microsoft docs: Lazy load assemblies in ASP.NET Core Blazor WebAssembly

The issue is the Project Configuration and Router Configuration sections of the docs as of this post are still not up to date. With .NET 8, the WASM assemblies are now built as .wasm files not .dll files and therefore the main update you'll need to make are inside the .csproj file and within the definition of the LazyAssemblyLoader routing code to use the .wasm file extension for the referenced .dlls:

.csproj file updates

Routing file updates

If continuing to use the old code with the .dll extension you would get the following error on building your application:

Unable to find 'EngineAnalyticsWebApp.TestLazy.dll' to be lazy loaded later. Confirm that project or package references are included and the reference is used in the project" error on build

Upon making the required updates to your .NET 8 application to prevent the error above, your app should successfully build, and you'll see the correct deferred execution in the browser.

Dealing with Time Skew and SAS Azure Blob Token Generation: 403 Failed to Authenticate Error

If you're working with the Azure.Storage.Blobs SDK in .NET and generating SAS tokens, you might come across an error like the following when making a call to GetUserDelegationKeyAsync():

Status 403: The request is not authorized to perform this operation using this permission

Here is a sample of code that might throw this error in which the startsOn value is set to the current time:

Before you start double checking all of the user permissions in Azure and going through all the Access Control and Role Assignments in Blob Storage (assuming you do have them configured correctly), this might be a red herring for a different issue with the startsOn value for the call to GetUserDelegationKeyAsync(). The problem is likely with clock skew and differences in times from the server and client.

It is documented in SAS best practices from the Azure docs (found here), the following issue with clock skew and how to remedy the issue:

Be careful with SAS start time. If you set the start time for a SAS to the current time, failures might occur intermittently for the first few minutes. This is due to different machines having slightly different current times (known as clock skew). In general, set the start time to be at least 15 minutes in the past. Or, don't set it at all, which will make it valid immediately in all cases. The same generally applies to expiry time as well--remember that you may observe up to 15 minutes of clock skew in either direction on any request. For clients using a REST version prior to 2012-02-12, the maximum duration for a SAS that does not reference a stored access policy is 1 hour. Any policies that specify a longer term than 1 hour will fail.

There is a simple fix for this as instructed to modify the startsOn value to be either not set or 15 minutes (or greater) in the past. With this updated code, the 403 error is fixed and will proceed as expected.