Blazor Components - 2022 Survey

We hope you had a happy and healthy holiday season.

We’ve nearly completed our 2022 Blazor Roadmap. Here’s a brief overview for our upcoming development plans (a blog post will be published shortly):

• Release our new Blazor Grid (with essential features)
• Deliver upgraded Blazor Editors
• Develop new Blazor Layout components
• Add more features to existing Blazor controls

In short, we’re focusing on highly requested features. However, there are two recent issues that may consume our resources and delay our product deliverables. To help us finalize and publish our Blazor roadmap, we need your feedback on the following:

1. AoT Compilation & Trimming

As you may already know, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 on November 8th, 2021.

DevExpress Blazor components support these products with our latest minor release (v21.2.4).

Limitations

Currently, our Blazor components do not support the following .NET 6 enhancements for Blazor Web Assembly applications:

• Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation
• Link trim mode

We recently discovered that AOT-compiled applications raise runtime exceptions. However, if AOT is disabled, the Web Assembly apps work without issues. If you encounter this issue, I recommend disabling AOT by removing the RunAOTCompilation option or setting it to false in your .csproj file:

<PropertyGroup>
  ...
  <RunAOTCompilation>false</RunAOTCompilation>
</PropertyGroup>

We are actively working on this complex issue both internally and with the Microsoft Blazor team. The main challenge is that the new AOT compiler lacks an effective way to debug the compiled assembly or map it to its source code.

We will continue to look for a solution, however, this unexpected task may delay our Blazor plans. Please fill out the survey below and tell us how important these recent features are for your Blazor projects.

2. Bootstrap Native Render

Our Blazor components render their HTML using Bootstrap which offers several advantages:

• Out-of-the box integration with Bootstrap themes supplied by Bootsrap contributors and third-party developers
• Application-level adaptivity
• Consistent look-and-feel across browsers and devices

The inherent advantage of using Bootstrap for constructing web user interfaces is that it allows for developing responsive layouts and provides your web application production-quality visual design from the start.

Limitations

However, we've found several component-specific issues: Bootstrap UI/UX is missing several key UI elements and features (e.g. hover state, bottom or side tabs, popup footers), the focus on data editor only highlights the text field instead of the entire component, read-only state is not supported, and Bootstrap themes have large/wide paddings that is great for mobile/touch screen devices but waste space on desktop layouts.

Rest assured, we've implemented custom (non-Bootstrap) code in our themes to overcome these annoyances and support the common features you've come to expect from our components. Therefore, our components may differ from classic Bootstrap – as our themes must support more component features.

We need your feedback to determine whether native Bootstrap rendering is important within your Blazor application.

Survey

Please help us prioritize our 2022 objectives by completing out this survey:

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