Ignite UI for Blazor Lite 0.1.0: New Components and Project & Item Templates

We just shipped IgniteUI.Blazor.Lite 0.1.0 — the first minor release of our free, MIT-licensed Blazor UI library — and alongside it a brand-new dotnet new template pack that gets you from empty folder to a themed, running Ignite UI Blazor app in one command (or one Visual Studio dialog).

This release brings the library up to date with igniteui-webcomponents 7.2.4 and rolls in the highlights from the last three Ignite UI for Blazor product updates — including four new components, a batch of component improvements, AI coding-assistant skills, and a long list of fixes. The full rundown is in the changelog; here’s the tour.

Four new components

Chat (preview)

IgbChat is a complete chat UI in a single component: message list, input area with attachments, typing indicator, and reply suggestions — a natural fit for the AI assistant scenarios everyone is building right now. You supply the messages and options; it handles the rendering, and events like MessageCreated let you plug in whatever backend produces the replies.

<IgbChat Messages="_messages" Options="_options" MessageCreated="OnMessageCreated" />

@code {
    private IgbChatMessage[] _messages = [];

    private readonly IgbChatOptions _options = new()
    {
        CurrentUserId = "user",
        HeaderText = "Product Support",
        InputPlaceholder = "Ask about installation, components, theming...",
        Suggestions = ["How do I install the library?", "What themes are available?"]
    };

    private async Task OnMessageCreated(IgbChatMessageEventArgs args)
    {
        _messages = [.. _messages, args.Detail];
        _options.IsTyping = true;
        // ...call your service, then append the reply message
    }
}

Slots and script renderers let you customize everything from the message header to the suggestion prefix. A heads-up: Chat is in preview — it’s under active development, some features aren’t implemented yet, and APIs may still evolve between releases.

📄 Chat documentation & samples

Splitter

IgbSplitter gives you a resizable split-pane layout: two panels — start and end — separated by a draggable bar, with collapse buttons and keyboard support built in. Panels take plain sizes (px, %, or auto), you can constrain them with min/max sizes, collapse them programmatically, and nest splitters for IDE-style layouts.

<IgbSplitter Orientation="SplitterOrientation.Horizontal" style="height: 400px;">
    <div slot="start">Navigation</div>
    <div slot="end">Content</div>
</IgbSplitter>

📄 Splitter documentation & samples

Highlight

IgbHighlight implements find-in-page for your own content: wrap any markup in it — plain text, cards, lists, even other components — set SearchText, and every match gets highlighted, with an active match you can step through via NextAsync()/PreviousAsync(). GetSizeAsync() and GetCurrentAsync() give you what you need for a “3 of 14 matches” counter, and the highlight colors are just CSS custom properties away from matching your brand. It stays fast even with hundreds of paragraphs of content.

<IgbHighlight @ref="_highlight" SearchText="@_searchText" CaseSensitive="false">
    <h1>Document Object Model</h1>
    <p>The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform interface...</p>
</IgbHighlight>

📄 Highlight documentation & samples

Theme Provider

Ever needed a dark sidebar in a light app, or a themed preview area inside a settings page? IgbThemeProvider scopes any of the Ignite UI themes (and light/dark variants) to a section of the page, so multiple themes can coexist — no iframe tricks, works in both Shadow and Light DOM.

<IgbThemeProvider Theme="Theme.Material" Variant="ThemeVariant.Dark">
    <IgbCard>
        <!-- everything in here renders Material Dark,
             the rest of the page keeps its global theme -->
    </IgbCard>
</IgbThemeProvider>

Documentation for Theme Provider is on its way — in the meantime, the theming docs cover the available themes and variants it works with.

Component improvements & fixes

Beyond the new components, 0.1.0 picks up a round of quality-of-life improvements:

• Badge — a new dot type, theme-based sizing, and an improved outline that follows WCAG AA accessibility standards.
• Checkbox — a new --tick-width CSS property for finer visual control.
• Combo — a DisableClear option to hide the clear button when clearing isn’t a valid action.
• Mask Input — Unicode digit code points are transformed to ASCII numbers for numeric patterns, so masks behave for users typing in non-Latin numeral systems.

There’s also a substantial batch of fixes across Calendar, Date Picker, Dialog, Tabs, Tooltip, Input, List, and more — the changelog has the full table with links to every PR.

AI skills for your coding assistant

If you’re using Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or another AI assistant, Ignite UI for Blazor now ships four skills that noticeably improve the code they generate: component usage, grids, theming, and generating UIs from an image or design. They live in the repo under skills/ — point your assistant at them and it stops hallucinating APIs and starts writing idiomatic Ignite UI Blazor code. More on how to set them up in the AI skills documentation.

New: project & item templates

This one’s been a frequent ask: IgniteUI.Blazor.Templates is a new dotnet new template pack with a full project template plus item templates for over 40 components.

Starting a new app

From the CLI, it’s two commands:

dotnet new install IgniteUI.Blazor.Templates
dotnet new igb-blazor -n MyApp --Hosting Auto --Theme material --Variant dark

In Visual Studio, the same template shows up in the Create a new project dialog as “Blazor Web App (IgniteUI)” after you install the pack — with the same options exposed in the wizard UI.

You get a ready-to-run Blazor Web App with the Ignite UI theme wired up, navigation built from IgbNavbar and IgbNavDrawer, and (optionally) a Weather sample page showing Grid Lite and charts in action. The knobs:

Pick Wasm or Auto and the template generates the host + client project pair for you, exactly like the stock Blazor Web App template — just already dressed up. Template descriptions are localized in English, Japanese, and Korean.

And if the Ignite UI CLI is already part of your toolbox, Blazor is now a first-class citizen there too (as of igniteui-cli 15.4.0): the same template pack drives ig new, both directly and through the step-by-step wizard —

ig new MyApp --framework blazor --hosting Auto --theme material --variant dark

— the CLI checks for the .NET SDK, installs IgniteUI.Blazor.Templates if it’s missing, and scaffolds through dotnet new igb-blazor for you. One CLI, whichever of our frameworks you’re building with that day.

Adding components to an existing app

The pack also includes item templates for the individual components — accordion to tree, grid to tile manager. Each one drops a small, self-contained .razor component (with its scoped CSS) into your project showing idiomatic usage you can edit down, instead of a blank file and a docs tab:

dotnet new igb-card -n ProfileCard
dotnet new igb-grid -n OrdersGrid

In Visual Studio they appear in the Add → New Item dialog with proper names and icons, and open in the editor right after creation.

Under the hood: ramping up OSS velocity

Shipping is a feature too, and this cycle we automated a good chunk of ours. IgniteUI.Blazor.Lite now publishes to NuGet through a dedicated release workflow, and CI gained a reworked test pipeline — including new bulk-automation tests that sweep the entire component API surface for regressions. Together with the usual repo & dependency hygiene, that means less release ceremony and more of our time going into components — so expect updates to land on NuGet faster and more often.

If you’ve been thinking about contributing, there’s never been a friendlier time to clone the repo — and the Blazing Story storybook under stories/ makes it easy to explore and develop components locally.

Get started

• 📦 IgniteUI.Blazor.Lite on NuGet · IgniteUI.Blazor.Templates on NuGet
• 📚 Documentation & samples
• ⭐ GitHub repository — issues, feature requests, and the roadmap
• 💬 Join us on Discord

As always — if you build something with the new components, or the templates save you an afternoon, we’d love to hear about it. And if something’s missing or broken, the issue tracker is right there. Happy coding!