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Despite working with .Net for decades, I've not jumped to blazor. The reasons are varied, many of which are well articulated in the article, but the most notab

Despite working with .Net for decades, I've not jumped to blazor. The reasons are varied, many of which are well articulated in the article, but the most notable throughout various workplaces I've worked at, there's been a hesitance to jump on MS web frameworks in fear of a repeat of silverlight. Silverlight burned a lot of small businesses hard, almost everywhere I've worked has had a silverlight horror story of a project they experimented in it with only for it to languish. So now they either have some outdated dependencies they'll never update or had to re-write it back into something else. Even without silverlight concerns, most .net places I've worked have very much been legacy focused. This might be my own culture fit at interviews so I end up with places with lots of legacy of course. But these giant legacy systems already have a plethora of mixed web technologies from ASP.net webforms, asp.net MVC, through .net core MVC, and many others. The willingness to add another different technology into the mix isn't relished. For small companies, the cost of migrating older projects to new technologies is a significant burden which gets ignored for as long as it can be reasonably done so.

xupybd 3y ago
I was helping to maintain an Adobe Flex system a few years back. It really sucks when your framework is simply obsolete like that. I don't know how to protect against that with the rate of change.
jsiepkes 3y ago
> there's been a hesitance to jump on MS web frameworks in fear of a repeat of silverlight. That's not really fair to MS since all the web frameworks which were born in that era (Adobe's AIR, JavaFX as a web tech, etc.) died because IE died. And also because Apple killed off browser plugins since they didn't work on the iPhone. Chrome and Firefox took over and there was no longer a need to use browser plugins for SPA's. HTML, CSS and Javascript finally got the features needed to create a proper SPA. While JavaFX did live on outside of the browser both Adobe RIA and Silverlight were far worse positioned for life outside of the browser (even though both claimed to be usable outside of the browser). Simply because JavaFX was meant to replace Java Swing.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  JavaFX never really became a thing, because even at Sun it had a bumpy start with the scripting based language before it got rebooted into Java, just before Sun went down. Oracle isn't a GUI company, beyond the stuff needed for their database products and IDEs, so they also didn't invest that much into it. Thus most of the Java ecosystem, kept targeting Swing, and for the extent native desktop applications are still around, Swing is good enough. Android is its own thing, so even one less reason to care about JavaFX.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    javax.window.JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Hello!"); Forever burnt into my mind from Programming 1008. And in fairness, much easier to get off the ground than the legions of XML required for JavaFX.
- BurnGpuBurn 3y ago
  Don't forget all the other products Microsoft managed to screw over developers with. Like discontinuing Xamarin.
  - bt4u 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jve 3y ago
    Sorry for not being up-to-date. I can't read anything about discontinuing Xamarin on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin Ok, MS says this: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/xamarin https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/x... > Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Mac are now integrated directly into .NET (starting with .NET 6) as Android, iOS, and Mac for .NET. If you're building with these project types today, they should be upgraded to .NET SDK-style projects for continued support. > Xamarin.Forms has evolved into .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) and existing Xamarin.Forms projects should be migrated to .NET MAUI. So to those of you using Xamarin: how painful it is? How compatible Xamarin.Forms or not is with .NET MAUI? Are they totally different tech? How easy/hard it is to go from Xamarin.{Android,iOS,Mac} to .NET6+ ?
torginus 3y ago
I like .NET, and I believe Blazor represents an unique capability for that tech stack, but using Blazor essentially means eschewing all the traditional web stack tooling that was built up around TS/JS during the past decade for proprietary Microsoft weirdness.
- jcmontx 3y ago
  > proprietary Microsoft weirdness .NET (and Blazor) has been open source for at least 7 years now
  - ajryan 3y ago
    Call it Blazor weirdness then. This obviously wasn’t a swipe at Microsoft being closed, just a point that Blazor stuff is not general standard web stuff.
  - cxr 3y ago
    Something can be both open source and proprietary. Flex has been open source for even longer. Still proprietary. See also: XUL.
keyle 3y ago
I professionally saw the rise, the peak and the burn of Director (Shockwave), Flash and Silverlight... By far, the most devastating one, was Flash. One good thing came out of Silverlight, and it's not really getting the credit it deserves: MVVM. As far as I know, Silverlight brought that pattern to light, before that, it was MVC and OO hell. And MVVM paved the way to modern paradigms, imho.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  Oh, me too. So much now-obsolete knowledge accumulated! Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. In the end it was killed (arguably) prematurely, but it probably wouldn't have lasted more than another 5-6 years anyway. Silverlight, I think, was worse - only a few years between initial launch and discontinuation. Pretty much every client app based on Silverlight would have had to have been rewritten from the ground up within a couple of years of completion. I try to learn lessons, in life. One of them is to not rely much on any Microsoft technology that's less than 10 years old.
  - keyle 3y ago
    I remember the transition to WPF apps was awfully painful.
  - throwaway_0235 3y ago
    > Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. I'm not sure that would happen. I think Flash would evolve to just "compile" to HMTL/JS. IOS/Android could be other targets as well, once they found a way that would not upset the Eye of Apple.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Not if Adobe was developing it. Flash was terrible for performance and battery life, and it was wedded to the classic fixed-size window with a keyboard and mouse. Even Android users who had access hated it. Now, it’s possible that some of that could’ve improved (battery life would’ve been hard due to the scene timing model) but Adobe just isn’t a platform company. They didn’t even want to fix the security problems, much less all of their half-assed APIs - they were even worse than Sun for announcing ambitious frameworks duplicating built-in OS features, shipping the easiest 40%, and then letting it stagnate because there was no way fixing the hard stuff would get them a second keynote.
oaiey 3y ago
I have to disagree. What you describe is every legacy stack and 20 years evolvement. Java with how many EE systems. JS with how many SPA frameworks. Python I know too little. Go/Rust are too young to have history.
kgwxd 3y ago
Silverlight was an obvious bust from the beginning, no one with longevity in mind jumped on that ship and fought against anyone pitching it at the time (mostly inexperienced devs, sales people, and tech companies looking to make a quick buck). Anything plug-in based was already on the chopping block by the time it came out. Blazor WASM is, at least, as safe a bet as any popular JS framework. If .NET was still a Windows only thing, I'd stick with the JS frameworks, but now that it's cross platform, I've got no problem choosing Blazor over any other UI framework that just as easily might need a full rewrite in a few years.

xupybd 3y ago

I was helping to maintain an Adobe Flex system a few years back. It really sucks when your framework is simply obsolete like that. I don't know how to protect against that with the rate of change.

jsiepkes 3y ago

> there's been a hesitance to jump on MS web frameworks in fear of a repeat of silverlight. That's not really fair to MS since all the web frameworks which were born in that era (Adobe's AIR, JavaFX as a web tech, etc.) died because IE died. And also because Apple killed off browser plugins since they didn't work on the iPhone. Chrome and Firefox took over and there was no longer a need to use browser plugins for SPA's. HTML, CSS and Javascript finally got the features needed to create a proper SPA. While JavaFX did live on outside of the browser both Adobe RIA and Silverlight were far worse positioned for life outside of the browser (even though both claimed to be usable outside of the browser). Simply because JavaFX was meant to replace Java Swing.

pjmlp 3y ago
JavaFX never really became a thing, because even at Sun it had a bumpy start with the scripting based language before it got rebooted into Java, just before Sun went down. Oracle isn't a GUI company, beyond the stuff needed for their database products and IDEs, so they also didn't invest that much into it. Thus most of the Java ecosystem, kept targeting Swing, and for the extent native desktop applications are still around, Swing is good enough. Android is its own thing, so even one less reason to care about JavaFX.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  javax.window.JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Hello!"); Forever burnt into my mind from Programming 1008. And in fairness, much easier to get off the ground than the legions of XML required for JavaFX.
BurnGpuBurn 3y ago
Don't forget all the other products Microsoft managed to screw over developers with. Like discontinuing Xamarin.
- bt4u 3y ago
  [dead]
- jve 3y ago
  Sorry for not being up-to-date. I can't read anything about discontinuing Xamarin on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin Ok, MS says this: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/xamarin https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/x... > Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Mac are now integrated directly into .NET (starting with .NET 6) as Android, iOS, and Mac for .NET. If you're building with these project types today, they should be upgraded to .NET SDK-style projects for continued support. > Xamarin.Forms has evolved into .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) and existing Xamarin.Forms projects should be migrated to .NET MAUI. So to those of you using Xamarin: how painful it is? How compatible Xamarin.Forms or not is with .NET MAUI? Are they totally different tech? How easy/hard it is to go from Xamarin.{Android,iOS,Mac} to .NET6+ ?

torginus 3y ago

I like .NET, and I believe Blazor represents an unique capability for that tech stack, but using Blazor essentially means eschewing all the traditional web stack tooling that was built up around TS/JS during the past decade for proprietary Microsoft weirdness.

jcmontx 3y ago
> proprietary Microsoft weirdness .NET (and Blazor) has been open source for at least 7 years now
- ajryan 3y ago
  Call it Blazor weirdness then. This obviously wasn’t a swipe at Microsoft being closed, just a point that Blazor stuff is not general standard web stuff.
- cxr 3y ago
  Something can be both open source and proprietary. Flex has been open source for even longer. Still proprietary. See also: XUL.

keyle 3y ago

I professionally saw the rise, the peak and the burn of Director (Shockwave), Flash and Silverlight... By far, the most devastating one, was Flash. One good thing came out of Silverlight, and it's not really getting the credit it deserves: MVVM. As far as I know, Silverlight brought that pattern to light, before that, it was MVC and OO hell. And MVVM paved the way to modern paradigms, imho.

sanitycheck 3y ago
Oh, me too. So much now-obsolete knowledge accumulated! Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. In the end it was killed (arguably) prematurely, but it probably wouldn't have lasted more than another 5-6 years anyway. Silverlight, I think, was worse - only a few years between initial launch and discontinuation. Pretty much every client app based on Silverlight would have had to have been rewritten from the ground up within a couple of years of completion. I try to learn lessons, in life. One of them is to not rely much on any Microsoft technology that's less than 10 years old.
- keyle 3y ago
  I remember the transition to WPF apps was awfully painful.
- throwaway_0235 3y ago
  > Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. I'm not sure that would happen. I think Flash would evolve to just "compile" to HMTL/JS. IOS/Android could be other targets as well, once they found a way that would not upset the Eye of Apple.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Not if Adobe was developing it. Flash was terrible for performance and battery life, and it was wedded to the classic fixed-size window with a keyboard and mouse. Even Android users who had access hated it. Now, it’s possible that some of that could’ve improved (battery life would’ve been hard due to the scene timing model) but Adobe just isn’t a platform company. They didn’t even want to fix the security problems, much less all of their half-assed APIs - they were even worse than Sun for announcing ambitious frameworks duplicating built-in OS features, shipping the easiest 40%, and then letting it stagnate because there was no way fixing the hard stuff would get them a second keynote.

oaiey 3y ago

I have to disagree. What you describe is every legacy stack and 20 years evolvement. Java with how many EE systems. JS with how many SPA frameworks. Python I know too little. Go/Rust are too young to have history.

kgwxd 3y ago

Silverlight was an obvious bust from the beginning, no one with longevity in mind jumped on that ship and fought against anyone pitching it at the time (mostly inexperienced devs, sales people, and tech companies looking to make a quick buck). Anything plug-in based was already on the chopping block by the time it came out. Blazor WASM is, at least, as safe a bet as any popular JS framework. If .NET was still a Windows only thing, I'd stick with the JS frameworks, but now that it's cross platform, I've got no problem choosing Blazor over any other UI framework that just as easily might need a full rewrite in a few years.