Blazor is still a bit rough around the edges but I find it so promising. I really hope Microsoft whole heartedly embraces it for front end development.
Have you seen the Blazor work planned for .NET 6? Hot reload and desktop apps with Blazor UI are both priority-0 (ultra-high priority) epics, I'm really looking forward to it.
Hot reload would probably cut my implementation time in half on this current project. Regardless, its still lightyears better than developing some javascript SPA and fighting all that extra boilerplate.
Always a possibility but seems unlikely based on the efforts and cross-platform story that Blazor brings in.
Silverlight required add-ons for all platforms to be pre-installed. That was too similar to Flash and Silvelight became obsolete as soon as these plug-ins were not going to be supported on iPad and iPhones. There was no real point anymore.
At this stage, I see Blazor as a necessity for the .Net platform to move forward on being relevant for apps that require UI. There is no real official .Net cross-platform way of building complex user interfaces.
Blazor has the advantage of being a platform on which MS can build on to bring all types of apps together: they can be OS agnostic (.NET 5.0 already runs on Win, Mac and Linux) and target web, desktop and mobile in one swoop, although it will require a few iterations to have an ecosystem rich and stable enough to work well and consistently everywhere.
The biggest issue with it is a really large binaries that have to be downloaded on page start. So it isn't necessarily suitable for use cases where speed matters. But at the same time, it's perfect for dashboards, I really like to work with it.
Server-side Blazor is as fast as any other server-side app, and can prerender the page before the JS adds the websocket connection for interactivity.
Client-side Blazor can also be prerendered now and has much better trimming so you can still see static HTML content instantly while the rest loads up in the background.
We use server-side Blazor for all of our interfaces. These load incredibly quickly. I personally don't like the concept of WASM and client-side Blazor. Especially, for the use cases where <100 people are going to be using the system at the same time.
