Microsoft on Blazor WebAssembly Debugging Feedback: 'That … – Visual Studio Magazine
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Microsoft’s Daniel Roth took to X (Twitter) to garner feedback on Blazor WebAssembly client-side debugging and received an earful in response, including complaints about associated Hot Reload functionality.
“That sounds awful!” said the Blazor product manager last week in response to a developer claiming it takes minutes for Hot Reload — making code changes that are instantly reflected in a running app — to display those code changes.
Roth’s Oct. 24 post read: “Hey all you Blazor WebAssembly users out there! How are things going with Blazor WebAssembly debugging? What sorts of pain points are you still hitting with the debugging experience? Please include details of your .NET and Visual Studio versions if possible!”
One response read: “VS 17.8.0 Preview 3. A .NET7 Blazor Server project. Debugging is fine. Hot Reload is a real pain. Takes minutes to reflect changes. I am better off restarting the app after every change.”
Roth’s reply: “Minutes?!? That sounds awful! Is this in Visual Studio or using ‘dotnet watch’? Have you opened any Visual Studio feedback tickets or GitHub issues for this?”
Roth further investigated the problem, which was also experienced by a dev team that said: “Same for us, any decent sized project takes a couple of minutes for hot reload to work, and even then sometimes it doesn’t work at all. We’re using latest Visual studio 2022.”
He also repeated advice to open up an associated feedback issue to help guide the dev team in response to comments (44 in total) like:
The feedback came with .NET 8 being just a few weeks away from shipping. It joins many GitHub issues in the aspnetcore repo marked “feature-hot-reload,” with 174 closed and 33 still open.
The “Hot Reload for Blazor #5456” GitHub issue has been problematic since 2018, when Roth at one point said: “We’ve hit a snag with live reload for 0.2.0, so moving this out until we can work through a more robust design.” Although that issue was closed in September 2021 when it was deemed “completed” for .NET 6, Roth’s post and resulting feedback shows it is still problematic and top-of-mind for the dev team.
The team has advanced the feature since then, though, with this year’s Visual Studio 2022 17.5 release supporting Hot Reload for CMake projects and even XAML.
However, the road has been bumpy, with a 2022 GitHub issue titled “Hot Reload nearly always fails, with Blazor WebAssembly and “dotnet watch” #45519” listing many related issues, as shown in this screenshot:
That post also listed links to conversations about the issue around the web:
Microsoft’s documentation for.NET Hot Reload in ASP.NET Core (the framework where Blazor lives) shows that Blazor WebAssembly Hot Reload supports the following code changes:
while not supporting these code changes:
With .NET 8 done at this point, some Hot Reload work items still showing as “Open” and marked “.NET 9 Planning” include:
Some issues marked “Backlog” include:
In last week’s X thread, Roth also took time out to answer a question about the future viability of Blazor, whose main selling point is that it lets Microsoft-centric developers use C# for web-dev projects instead of the nearly ubiquitous JavaScript. Blazor WebAssembly is the client-side of the full-stack Blazor offering, paired with Blazor Server.
The question read: “Will Blazor be as performant as other js frameworks in the future? Is this possible?”
Roth’s reply: “It depends on the scenario. .NET generally has a performance advantage on the server, like with server-side rendering. On the client JavaScript has an advantage because it ships as part of the web platform.”
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.
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