What is Browser Link?

Browser Link is a feature in Visual Studio that creates a communication channel between the development environment and one or more web browsers. You can use Browser Link to refresh your web application in several browsers at once, which is useful for cross-browser testing.

How Does It Work?

Browser Link uses SignalR to create a communication channel between Visual Studio and the browser. When Browser Link is enabled, Visual Studio acts as a SignalR server that multiple clients (browsers) can connect to. Browser Link also registers an HTTP module with ASP.NET. This module injects special <script> references into every page request from the server. You can see the script references by selecting “View source” in the browser.

Your source files are not modified. The HTTP module injects the script references dynamically.

Because the browser-side code is all JavaScript, it works on all browsers that SignalR supports, without requiring any browser plug-in.

Earlier Discussion

We discussed about the browser link in .Net Framework earlier.

Take a look at here:

Browser Link option in Visual Studio

BrowserLink in ASP .NET Core

To use BrowserLink in ASP .NET Core, we should do few tweaks in the source code.

Install the following package in your project

Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.BrowserLink

Or using packet manager

Install-Package Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.BrowserLink -Version 2.2.0

And config BrowserLink in your startup.cs

if (env.IsDevelopment()) { app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage(); app.UseBrowserLink(); }

Start using

Now start using the BrowserLink from the tool bar dashboard

Happy Coding!