Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 – Chat, Splitter, Highlight & Dock Manager

Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 (build 26.1.51) ships three new components - the IgbChat preview, IgbSplitter, and IgbHighlight - plus a Dock Manager update on the 2.1 web component with two-way Layout binding and new pane and tab events. The release also provides four Agent Skills for AI-assisted development that ground GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, and JetBrains AI in correct Ignite UI APIs. No breaking changes; supports .NET 10 and .NET 9.

Radoslav Mirchev Jun 17, 2026 5 min read

Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 (build 26.1.51) is now available. This release adds three new components, extends the Dock Manager with two-way layout binding and a wider event surface, and ships four Agent Skills for AI coding assistants.

What’s new in Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1
– IgbChat (Preview) – a chat component with messages, attachments, suggestions, and typing indicators
– IgbSplitter – resizable two-pane layouts with collapse, keyboard support, and nesting
– IgbHighlight – search and highlight text projected into the component
– IgbDockManager – two-way Layout binding plus new pane and tab events (Dock Manager 2.1)
– Four Agent Skills – components, grids, theming, and design-to-view guidance for AI assistants
✅ No breaking changes

📦 dotnet add package IgniteUI.Blazor.Trial --version 26.1.51
📄 Full changelog

Blazor 26.1 (build 26.1.51) is the current build in the Ultimate 26.1 release cycle, which also contains the earlier 25.2.77 build. The components and changes below are net-new in 26.1.51, not a re-roll of 25.2.77.

Chat Component (Developer Preview)

IgbChat is a chat UI component for displaying messages and handling input. It supports attachments, suggestions, typing indicators, and custom templates, so you can stand up a messaging surface without hand-building the layout and state handling.

IgbChat is in Developer Preview – some features are not yet implemented and the API may change in upcoming builds, so keep it out of production paths for now. A Chat component already exists in Ignite UI for Web Components; 26.1 brings the pattern to Blazor.

Read the IgbChat documentation ->

Splitter Component

IgbSplitter divides a view into two resizable panels – start and end – separated by a draggable bar. It supports horizontal or vertical layouts, collapse and expand, keyboard resizing, and nested split views, which covers editor/preview and master-detail screens without writing custom drag and sizing logic.

This matches IgcSplitter (Web Components 7.1.0) and IgrSplitter (React 19.6.0).

Read the IgbSplitter documentation ->

Highlight Component

IgbHighlight searches and highlights text projected into its default slot. Use it to mark search matches in rendered content without writing your own tokenizer or DOM-walking highlight logic, which is the usual source of off-by-one and nested-markup bugs.

This matches IgcHighlight (Web Components 7.1.0) and IgrHighlight (React 19.6.0).

Read the IgbHighlight documentation ->

Dock Manager Component

The Dock Manager moves to the 2.1 web component, bringing bug fixes, performance improvements, and a larger event surface. Two-way synchronization between the web component layout property and the Blazor Layout property lets you both drive and read docking state from Blazor, which is what makes saved and restored layouts and more complex docking scenarios practical.

New events cover pane drag, floating-pane resize, pin and flyout toggles, scroll, and pane and tab header lifecycle. React shipped the same Dock Manager 2.1.0 update in 19.6.0.

<!-- Illustrative: confirm exact binding and layout type in the docs -->
<IgbDockManager @bind-Layout="dockLayout" />

Read the Dock Manager documentation ->

Agent Skills for AI-assisted development

Ignite UI for Blazor provides four Agent Skills – developer-owned instruction files that ground AI coding assistants in correct Ignite UI APIs. Each targets a specific failure mode: igniteui-blazor-components steers component and form-control selection; igniteui-blazor-grids handles grid type choice and column configuration; igniteui-blazor-theming covers palettes, typography, and theming setup; and igniteui-blazor-generate-from-image-design turns a design image into a Blazor view.

They work with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and JetBrains AI Assistant. Configure them with the CLI, which also writes the MCP server entries to .vscode/mcp.json – then start the servers in your AI client (Claude Code starts them on first tool use).

npx igniteui-cli ai-config

See the AI-assisted development overview ->

⚠️ Breaking Changes & Migration

✅ No breaking changes in this release. This build also fixes two IgbGrid issues that caused repeated internal messaging on every state change – see the full changelog for details.

Install Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1

Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 supports .NET 10 and .NET 9. Evaluation users install the public trial package from NuGet.org; licensed users install IgniteUI.Blazor from the Infragistics licensed feed.

# Trial / evaluation - public NuGet.org
dotnet add package IgniteUI.Blazor.Trial --version 26.1.51

# Licensed users - Infragistics licensed feed
# 1) Configure the Infragistics licensed NuGet feed (see link below)
# 2) dotnet add package IgniteUI.Blazor --version 26.1.51

Set up the Infragistics licensed NuGet feed ->