Markdown Posts Are Now Live! 🎉

After months of being stuck in development limbo, the markdown feature for this blog is finally complete! With the help of Claude Code, what was a long-pending task got wrapped up in just a few hours today.

The Power of Source Generators

This blog now supports writing posts in markdown, and here's the cool part: this very post you're reading was written in markdown and compiled into a Blazor component at build time!

The implementation uses C# source generators to:

• Parse markdown files during compilation
• Extract YAML frontmatter for metadata
• Convert markdown to HTML using Markdig
• Transform code blocks into syntax-highlighted components
• Generate fully-functional Blazor components

Here's a glimpse of how it works:

[Generator]
public class MarkdownGenerator : ISourceGenerator
{
    public void Execute(GeneratorExecutionContext context)
    {
        // Parse markdown files
        // Generate Blazor components
        // No runtime overhead!
    }
}
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Why This Matters

Writing blog posts in markdown brings several benefits:

1. Faster content creation - No more wrestling with Razor syntax
2. Better performance - All conversion happens at compile time
3. Full Blazor integration - Generated components work exactly like hand-written ones
4. SEO-friendly - Works perfectly with static pre-rendering

A Nod to Claude Code

This feature had been sitting incomplete on the feature/markdown branch for quite some time. Today, with Claude Code's assistance, we:

• Fixed the source generator implementation
• Resolved namespace and inheritance issues
• Integrated proper layout rendering
• Added syntax highlighting for code blocks
• Ensured compatibility with the existing blog infrastructure

What would have taken days of debugging and trial-and-error was accomplished in a single focused session. The AI didn't just write code—it understood the architecture, debugged issues systematically, and even helped with the proper integration into the existing Blazor WebAssembly setup.

Technical Implementation

The magic happens through a source generator that:

# 1. Reads markdown files with frontmatter
---
title: Your Post Title
date: 2025-08-14
---

# 2. Converts to Blazor components
# 3. Integrates with existing blog system
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All markdown files in Pages/Posts/YYYY/ are automatically discovered and converted during build time. The generated components inherit from BlogPostComponent and use the same PostLayout as regular Razor posts.

Looking Forward

With markdown support now live, creating new content for this blog becomes significantly easier. The combination of Blazor's component model, C# source generators, and markdown's simplicity creates a powerful blogging platform that's both developer-friendly and performant.

And yes, it's pretty meta that this post announcing markdown support was itself written in markdown and processed by the very system it's describing!

This feature was completed on August 14, 2025, with the assistance of Claude Code—turning a long-pending task into a success story in just a few hours.