Comment by ripley12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ripley12 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Agreed, I really think Blazor is the way forward for .NET UI. It's bittersweet, but: the Windows and .NET teams have failed to deliver a compelling alternative to web UI, and I'm impressed with how well Blazor integrates web UI with .NET.

I think the killer feature is that it will work on any platform with a decent webview control (Windows will finally be joining that club soon when WebView2 ships in-box), including MAUI; so you can use the native hosting bits of MAUI and the web UI bits of Blazor, no XAML required. And then you can reuse that same UI on another platform or a web browser, trivially.

Hot reload for Blazor dropped in the recent .NET 6 preview 3 so this is a really good time to get started with it. It blows XAML Hot Reload out of the water because it can reload many C# changes in addition to HTML/CSS changes; XAML Hot Reload breaks down as soon as you need to change any C# code that touches your UI.

Xaml hot reload only works on about half of our views at work, and even then it tends to break itself. I've tried net framework, net core, and net 5. The newer targets break less often but we still can't ship net 5 thanks to Windows 7 extended support contracts from Microsoft. It doesn't even compare to blazors implementation. And c# hot reload breaks frequently around asyncs and lambdas.

> The newer targets break less often but we still can't ship net 5 thanks to Windows 7 extended support contracts from Microsoft

You make it sound like it's Microsoft's fault your customers won't move off of Windows 7.

He has a point, for example now they've finally stopped supporting IE11 you can legitimately say to customers that supporting IE11 is no longer possible because it's a security hole.

Extended support by MS for Windows 7 means the only reason you're not supporting it yourself is your lack of motivation, and so to your customers (and your own upper management), for a big contract that's not going to wash.

You might even find that their contract even says something to that effect.

I may be misreading your comment, but in case you're not aware .NET 5 supports Windows 7 as a deployment platform: https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/5.0/5...

And it does not specifically require any paid extended support contract from Microsoft to actually install and run.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com