How can Blazor feel less like Silverlight and Web Forms and more like a tool for people who are comfortable with the web?

[JesperTreetop]

To begin with: Blazor is not Silverlight. Whether Silverlight was wise or not, it was pretty much doomed by the time it showed up due to the way it was an NSAPI plugin. Blazor is either server-side or client-side with WebAssembly, so it doesn't have that problem.

But I spend a lot of my time making web applications and web sites, and even though I really dislike the 95 hoops you have to jump through to get Webpack to do what you want, at least for the next few months, Blazor does not feel inviting at all to me.

Interoperating with JavaScript is possible, but in every presentation I've seen it's been an afterthought, and it's been clunky. Rather than embracing the web that exists today and letting us get work done by using the tools we need to use, Blazor does have a distinct feel of what Microsoft is sometimes accused of and what definitely was the case with Silverlight - erecting a wall, declaring a new ecosystem, and hoping you'll stay inside it.

The thrust of Blazor today seems to be you'll never have to write JavaScript again, and while I can empathize with that sentiment and with the people who like it, as long as that's the motto I will be reticent to use it, because it sounds suspiciously like there's no incentive when developing Blazor to make it easy for those of us who want to keep using web technologies in addition to C#.

Blazor is a technical marvel, and it's basically checking all the boxes Web Forms (of all things) wanted to check, with C# everywhere. But having tried to keep Web Forms applications up-to-date as the web allowed more and more things, I also recognize the sinking feeling in my stomach that I may end up fighting myself as soon as I want to do something that goes a few step beyond "hello world", like continuously validate a form where some of the inputs are provided by off-site JavaScript libraries.

Basically: please make sure that Blazor isn't just a tool for making applications in the shape of HTML pages with WebAssembly, but that they can handle everyday web development tasks, and let some of the allure be that Blazor makes it both possible and easy to do webby things.

[DammyDev]

JavaScript is very possible with Blazor, that's a distinct feel. WebAssembly has come to stay, it will surely get easier.

[SQL-MisterMagoo]

Rather than embracing the web that exists today and letting us get work done by using the tools we need to use

That is the whole point of something new like running .NET in the browser, isn't it - to move away from the current tools, by which I can only assume you mean JavaScript.

Blazor does have a distinct feel of what Microsoft is sometimes accused of and what definitely was the case with Silverlight - erecting a wall, declaring a new ecosystem, and hoping you'll stay inside it.

Maybe this is a misconception? The whole message that comes with Blazor is "do it your way" - if you want to use JavaScript - that's fine - you can use all the JS/Typescript you want - and calling into it is a one-liner from Blazor.

However, and this is key - you have to be willing to learn new ways - 99% (not a fact, just a turn of phrase) of the things you need to make a basic web site do not require JavaScript - people have forgotten that - and for those 1% of things that require access that Blazor/WebAssembly doesn't yet have there are Nuget packages that abstract away the JavaScript, so the .NET developer doesn't need to write any.

But the bottom line is - Blazor does not put any barriers in the way of using any tools you want.

[JesperTreetop]

However, and this is key - you have to be willing to learn new ways - 99% (not a fact, just a turn of phrase) of the things you need to make a basic web site do not require JavaScript - people have forgotten that - and for those 1% of things that require access that Blazor/WebAssembly doesn't yet have there are Nuget packages that abstract away the JavaScript, so the .NET developer doesn't need to write any.

I don't mind writing the client DOM manipulation in C# in my own Blazor code - that's the entire point of the product. (And the 👎-voters on the original post can rest easy, I'm not going to force anyone to write JavaScript.) But going by every web development project I've worked with in the past 20 years, eventually I'm going to have to work with other things. Be that a library for one of 50 finicky problems that you don't want to have to rewrite or a dependency that you can't control that has to be used, it's a statistical improbability even if Blazor is tremendously successful that everything will be in Blazor.

Much of the discussion of Blazor is centered around the premise of JavaScript eradication, and what gets lost is that in real projects people need to use it at least in some corner. If Blazor does this right it will be a great product that works with the web and not against it. If Blazor does this wrong, it'll turn into the cultural equivalent of Web Forms or Silverlight, which is to say that you're supposed to praise its extensive ecosystem because there are UI frameworks available from both Infragistics and Telerik, if the snark is allowed to illustrate a way of thinking.

The reason I'm skeptical of "NuGet wrapper" thinking is because I've worked with the consequences of it in Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Core in various forms. The desire to smooth out the surfaces ends up being an impediment to productivity, because suddenly you now also have to figure out why the wrapper does what it does, or why it lags behind four versions, or why it's stopped being updated.