Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 - Agent Skills, MCP, Grids & New Components

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.

• IgbChat (Preview) - a chat component with messages, reactions, 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 📦

📄

Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 is part of the broader Infragistics Ultimate 26.1 release. For the full cross-framework picture - the AI-assisted development toolchain plus what shipped in Angular, React, and Web Components - see

.

Below are the highlights.

Agent Skills and MCP for AI-Assisted Development

Ignite UI for Blazor provides four

• developer-owned instruction files that ground AI coding assistants in correct Ignite UI APIs. Each targets a specific failure mode:

steers component and form-control selection;

handles grid type choice and column configuration;

covers palettes, typography, and theming setup; and

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

• then start the servers in your AI client (Claude Code starts them on first tool use).

The Ignite UI CLI MCP server officially supports Blazor - documentation and API - as of CLI 15.2.0, so a connected AI assistant can query Blazor component docs and API references directly through the Model Context Protocol, not only through the Agent Skills.

npx igniteui-cli ai-config

Grid Performance

The H1 2026 cycle delivers six rendering and change-detection optimizations across the grid scroll pipeline - applied automatically, with no API changes - to the Data Grid, Tree Grid, Hierarchical Grid, and Pivot Grid. Measured on a 100k-row dataset (Angular, React, Web Components):

Blazor (25.2.77) gets the same dynamic scroll-throttle optimization; Blazor-specific FPS and TBT numbers are not published. This scroll work is one milestone in a longer arc - earlier releases reworked the data pipeline (Schwartzian-transform sort, iterative grouping, Excel-style filtering) to handle 1M+ rows. Full account:

. Delivered in Angular 21.1, React 19.5.0/19.5.1, Web Components 7.0.0, and Blazor 25.2.77.

Chat Component (Developer Preview)

IgbChat is a chat UI component for displaying messages and handling input. It provides a ready-made chat surface - message list, input, reactions, suggestions, typing indicators, and custom templates - so you assemble the conversation UI from a component instead of building it by hand.

IgbChat is in Developer Preview: some capabilities are still in progress (attaching new files is not yet available, for example) 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.

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.

With IgbSplitter, Blazor joins Web Components (IgcSplitter 7.1.0) and React (IgrSplitter 19.6.0), which already ship the component.

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.

With IgbHighlight, Blazor joins Web Components (IgcHighlight 7.1.0) and React (IgrHighlight 19.6.0), which already ship the component.

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

property and the Blazor

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.

The release adds 15 new events covering active-pane changes, pane drag and floating-pane resize lifecycles, pane close, pin and flyout toggles, scroll, and pane and tab header connect/disconnect.

<IgbDockManager @bind-Layout="dockLayout" />

⚠️ Breaking Changes & Migration

✅ No breaking changes are documented in the changelog for this release. This build also fixes two

issues that caused repeated internal messaging on every state change - see the

for details.

Install Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1

Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1 supports .NET 8, .NET 9, and .NET 10. Evaluation users install the public trial package from NuGet.org; licensed users install

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

Get Started with Ignite UI for Blazor 26.1

Upgrade an existing project or start a new one from the getting started guide.