"Every new feature piles up the technical debt..."

Let's face it, your employers generally want you to go quicker.

Whether it's adding a new feature, fixing a bug, or spinning up a whole new app, they want it now, and they want it to work as advertised.

And this makes sense.

They have a business to run, your code is going to help them make money (or save money) and they want those results as soon as possible.

But here's the rub.

You know how software really works.

You know you could just throw all the code in one giant file, hack together some CSS and HTML, and ship the feature 'ASAP'.

But you also know you've got to live with it for the next 3 years (at least).

One minute it's a 'simple product list page', next it's a thousand line behemoth, riddled with endless conditional logic and a mess of tangled components all fighting over the same shared data.

Fast today, grinding to a halt tomorrow.

Start fast, stay fast

But it doesn't have to be this way, a seemingly impossible choice between rushing now or building something you can live with.

Web Development has changed a lot over the last decade and a productive, sustainable approach has emerged;

Using components you can build small, well encapsulated pieces of UI and glue them together to form larger features.

Done 'right' components enable you to get features up and running quickly, and continue to go fast as they change and evolve over time.

Get in, get done, go home by lunch time (well, we can dream!)

Blazor brings a powerful component model to .NET development.

It frees you up to break complex requirements down into smaller tasks, to build entire applications, one component at a time.

And with .NET 8, Blazor has become a 'drop in' replacement for MVC and Razor Pages too.

But there's a catch…

If you just carry on building pages and call them components you're missing out on nearly all of Blazor's potential.

While .NET 8 makes it possible to use components 'everywhere', in practice you soon run into challenges:

• How far can you go with .NET 8's static server-side rendering before turning to one of Blazor's interactive modes (Server or WASM)?
• How do you set about building line of business applications now you have multiple render modes to think about?
• When should you spin up a new component vs keeping it all in one place?
• Which components should you extract?
• How do you make your components talk to each other?

It's a lot to wrap your head around

Adjust your mindset to 'think in components' and you can build much more reliable, much easier to maintain Blazor web applications, faster.

With a handful of core strategies, you can ease past the uncertainty, lift yourself out of analysis paralysis, and keep those new features rolling.

But it requires a practical approach that meets reality where it is.

Introducing Practical Blazor Components - The fastest way to get up to speed with Blazor and .NET 8

It's all well and good people like me telling you to 'keep it simple' or 'start with the basics' but what does that actually mean?

Who's going to tell you how to take the 'simplest' approach when you're working on your own projects?

And what is the simplest approach anyway? One big component, or lots of smaller components? Should components fetch their own data or accept it via parameters?

Practical Blazor Components is a new self-paced course that will give you answers to these questions.

Learn, practice, and internalise how Blazor's component model really works:

How to build web applications using .NET 8's static SSR mode, where to put your state, how to communicate between components and how to break your UI down into smaller pieces.

In short, how to deliver reliable, scalable web applications, faster.

Compared to live training:

1. Work through the exercises and projects in your own time
2. Ask questions and get feedback as you go (via the Practical ASP.NET Pro Community)
3. Read, and re-read the lessons - plug gaps in your knowledge and cement your understanding
4. Access the course materials forever
5. Take the course in the comfort of your own home
6. No need to travel, or take time off work
7. Pay a fraction of the cost of live training