Has anyone done anything useful with Blazor? Does anyone think it will become useful for writing serious client-side web apps?
I ask because I spent the whole afternoon stuffing around with it. After bumbling around installing and uninstalling different Core and Standard SDKs and Runtimes, and installing a VS2017 extension, I managed (after a lot of hassle) to get the demo running. Then I noticed I had 10 different runtimes installed so I uninstalled the ones I thought were older version near-duplicates. That broke my Blazor development for ever more. I have tried to reinstall and reconstruct the environment I had earlier when the demo worked, but I've only partly succeeded. Now the demo runs, but dies with a generic app failed message. I'm completely stuck there now. That aside, I'm disappointed that the resulting app is still based upon html, css and JavaScript. It's unclear just how JS is being used in the mix and what role it's playing. So despite the promises of Wasm with Blazor, we're going to spend the next decade continuing to try to cobble together UIs with top quality appearance and behaviour in html, css and scripts in web browsers, and Wasm does nothing to help get us out of this browser-based quagmire … pull the other one! Or do I misunderstand the architecture and Wasm makes better promises that I haven't seen yet? Now I realise just how much I miss writing "real" apps with XAML in Silverlight. *Greg K*
