If you want to write a dynamic web application in 2019 then the chances are that you will reach out for a JavaScript solution, and that solution will probably be React. We compare React to Blazor, a new .NET framework allowing you to write in C# for the front and back ends.
Using Blazor, code written for the front-end has access to all the language features of C#. In particular, it may be useful to have a type hierarchy and make use of polymorphism. However, JSON objects have no explicit type, so how can we correctly deserialise a subtype?
One of the benefits of Blazor is that you can share C# objects between the server-side processing and the client-side processing. In this year’s Dev Camp we wanted to put this to the test with validation of dynamic forms.
Our final day saw huge progress in the application's client and server sides coming together. This was really the focus of the day with everyone working together to solve the final challenges and get the client communicating with the server.
Development progresses on all fronts in day 4, with the client and server sides moving closer together thanks to new work on the shared classes and API.
By the end of day 3 we'd managed to get the Blazor application constructing a dynamic form based on an external set of defined fields and having those fields be validated dynamically on the client-side again based on externally defined validation rules. Here's what that looks like...
In day 2 the team continued making progress in each of their areas. The EventFlow project begins to come together, shared client and server validation plans are made, and getting Event Flow working with Cosmos DB causes frustration.
In day 1 we set up our client and server-side teams; identified useful resources and frameworks for the week; and began setting up the solution and its components.
At OCC, dev camps are a way for us to experiment with new technologies, create prototype products, and bring back recommendations to the wider company regarding the new tools and techniques we've been able to evaluate.
The JavaScript development community has become quite comfortable with the new language constructs introduced with ECMAScript 2015 (aka ES6). But work on ECMAScript didn't stop there. Here are some highlights from ES7, 8, 9 and 10.
More on Blazor – Microsoft’s experimental .NET web framework using C#/Razor and HTML that runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly. The TAB reviews the Blazor community, Razor Components and the Blazor workshop put together by the ASP .NET team. Plus tips from the coalface on building .NET Standard applications.
The TAB discusses TLS, https and W3C’s Feature Policy.
.NET Standard isn’t a framework or library: it’s a set of APIs that a platform has to implement or a library has to constrain itself to in order to claim to be compliant with the standard.
Aspect-oriented programming is an expansion on the principle of separation of concerns. It aims to extract cross-cutting concerns, such as authorisation or logging, that are often intermingled with other code.