I had high hopes for Blazor but it didn't really materialize. Instead I'm just sticking with Angular.
I don't think Microsoft doesn't know what to do with .NET. I think it continues on a very logical and direct path. But they have no idea what to do with UI on any platform. Luckily they haven't even deprecated any of the existing options and on the web, at least, you have all the same options as every other platform.
I avoided Blazor, despite multiple people on my teams pushing for it. It always felt like it fit in the same space as web forms and silverlight. A product created to fill a gap of developers that wrote desktop apps and don't want to learn how to write front end code for the web. Plus it binds you to the product lifecycle of a .net side project that likely will be abandoned.
While Blazor has some cool stuff built in, the cool stuff never felt worth the risk of building a product around it.
Honestly, I was wishing that Blazor was in the same space as web forms.
There is a market for front-end development that isn't steeped in the hell of actual front-end development. Blazor is almost the right idea but I think this incarnation is a dead end. Somebody needs to gather up all the pieces and figure it out for real.
Blazor honestly is great for 'I need to write a simple backend control plane for whatever'. I.e. internal only stuff where you care about just shipping something functional and don't care too much how it all looks/etc.
Further you go away from that circle, the less enticing it is.
Why is that? Do you speak from real-world experience?
Not trying to push back. We're planning to use it for some new projects we have coming up on our team of .NET devs who can't seem to grok Angular or React and the entire ecosystem of tooling required, so I'm looking for reasons we shouldn't use it aside from Blazor being rather unpopular compared to Angular/React/other JS libs
As grandparent said, Blazor optimized for fast delivery. For public products you will have places where you should care about interactivity a lot. Their solution is interop with JS. You may try WASM but it’s definitely slow for UI.
WASM good for complicated tools, but you better probably with other language if you looking for next Figma.
Hybrid approach which is default have two issues.
- round trip to the server. That’s not nice for interactivity and responsiveness.
- hybrid hydration model is needlessly complicated. And again it will not fully solve your problem when you need to go extra mile.
Overall cold start for WASM require large payload, for Hybrid you need Websockets for updates. That sucks outside of cities or on junkie mobile. Not for public product.
Working with Blazor from Net Core 2.2
For internal tooling, or B2B where you don’t care that much is very efficient.
I don't think Microsoft doesn't know what to do with .NET. I think it continues on a very logical and direct path. But they have no idea what to do with UI on any platform. Luckily they haven't even deprecated any of the existing options and on the web, at least, you have all the same options as every other platform.