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Tbh, since the introduction of .NET 7 WebAssembly, Blazor isn't my preferred way of writing .NET apps in the browser. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/use

Tbh, since the introduction of .NET 7 WebAssembly, Blazor isn't my preferred way of writing .NET apps in the browser. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/use-net-7-from-any-javascript-app-in-net-7/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/use-net-7-from-any-jav... Blazor is 2 things bundled together - a way of running .NET apps in the browser, via WebAssembly, and an SPA framework. Since .NET 7, it has become possible to use just the WebAssembly part. I prefer bundling .NET WASM, with a more traditional frontend framework, like React, since it doesn't suffer from all those issues others have mentioned in the thread. In addition, it's a battle-tested solution that most fronted devs are already familiar - the pool of devs writing kickass Blazor/ASP.NET Razor sites is comparatively tiny.

graboid 3y ago
That is interesting! Do you find that setup useful for CRUD-style apps too? What parts of your application would typically be written in WASM then? I am asking because if I look at my usecases, I mostly see rendering logic done by a JS framework and a restful API that does little more than serving the frontend by querying the DB and mapping between models.
- torginus 3y ago
  Well, I had 2 apps written this style in recent memory. One was adapting an existing app with a React frontend and a .NET backend to work in an air-gapped place - we just replaced all the backend calls to calls into the WASM runtime, which did its thing internally. The other was rearchitecting a microservice-based app, where the .NET server basically only served as middle-man, calling into other various services. Eliminating this middle-man and integrating it into the client allowed us to serve the whole thing statically from CloudFront which massively simplified our infra situation. I think where .NET shines is writing big, complex applications, for a simple CRUD app where the only thing I do is prod a database, I'd just go with a simple nodejs server. In my experience, I tend to write all business logic in the back-end, and the front-end's job is mainly just presenting it to the user, so even with fancy SPAs, the bulk of the complexity lives in the back-end. Keep in mind, that with all the super-duper trimming and size optimization options MS has added to .NET, the runtime is still multiple megabytes, so adding WASM .NET to your typical consumer website isn't super feasible, it's more for these niche use cases.
  - graboid 3y ago
    Thanks for the details, appreciated.

graboid 3y ago

That is interesting! Do you find that setup useful for CRUD-style apps too? What parts of your application would typically be written in WASM then? I am asking because if I look at my usecases, I mostly see rendering logic done by a JS framework and a restful API that does little more than serving the frontend by querying the DB and mapping between models.

torginus 3y ago
Well, I had 2 apps written this style in recent memory. One was adapting an existing app with a React frontend and a .NET backend to work in an air-gapped place - we just replaced all the backend calls to calls into the WASM runtime, which did its thing internally. The other was rearchitecting a microservice-based app, where the .NET server basically only served as middle-man, calling into other various services. Eliminating this middle-man and integrating it into the client allowed us to serve the whole thing statically from CloudFront which massively simplified our infra situation. I think where .NET shines is writing big, complex applications, for a simple CRUD app where the only thing I do is prod a database, I'd just go with a simple nodejs server. In my experience, I tend to write all business logic in the back-end, and the front-end's job is mainly just presenting it to the user, so even with fancy SPAs, the bulk of the complexity lives in the back-end. Keep in mind, that with all the super-duper trimming and size optimization options MS has added to .NET, the runtime is still multiple megabytes, so adding WASM .NET to your typical consumer website isn't super feasible, it's more for these niche use cases.
- graboid 3y ago
  Thanks for the details, appreciated.