Is anyone here actively using Blazor on a decent sized project? I used it for a while on my last contract but am unable to find new work anywhere that uses Blazor, not a single one!
Compared to server-side
ASP.NET and JS Frameworks, Blazor is a gift from heaven .. well ... sort-of. Here's a Friday story.
With the death of Silverlight, we had to replace an app with a quite rich UI with something else, what?! Like many people, I was spitting chips angry at the suggestion we must replace our Silverlight apps with HTML5 apps. The idea that HTML+CSS+JS could replace a WPF-like rich web UI made me laugh and cry at the same time.
Angular was really popular around 2018 so we got an offer to write a JS replacement for $200/hr. I then decided to learn Angular and watched 5 hours of a 10 hour Angular course, at which point I gave up and said f**k that s**t. Now what?
Luckily, Blazor 0.9 was in preview around this time. I spent a whole Sunday afternoon experimenting with Blazor. By the end of the day I had quite a sophisticated hobby app working with only a few hundred lines of coding, thanks to the familiarity of using VS, C# and Razor markup (with a bit of JS). The same app in
ASP.NET would have taken 5 times as long and 5 times the code. The same app in Angular would have required unfamiliar tooling and millions of lines of script.
To answer your question, I have one quite complex Blazor app being used by some huge US companies to analyse marketing data (using Telerik and SpreadJS components to attempt to make charts and grids as fancy as was possible in Silverlight). I have a couple of smaller apps in live use, and few little ones for utility use.
I know the guys at
Melbourne App Development are really keen on Blazor and were using it for some serious apps just as it reached version 1.0. About 18 months ago, Adam Cogan at SSW said during the preamble to one of their monthly presentations, that Blazor demand had overtaken JS.
I hope other people in here have similar stories.
I must end on a sad note.
ASP.NET, Blazor, JS, or whatever, all finish-up rendering in a web browser. It's tragic that the ancient dumb web browser is now the only host for web apps, and that we must attempt to present serious business applications using HTML, CSS and JS. The web browser was invented so we could have flame wars and look at pictures of cats and porn, it's barely evolved since then and it's completely inadequate for rendering business applications. Sure it can, but look at the flaming hoops and all the weird quirks you have to jump through. Web development is in a lamentable state.