Simple documentation for Blazor?

[baylf2000]

I'm new to C#, although I have a lot of experience in C++, Python, PHP etc.

I have the need to create a simple windows application that presents a very basic web interface to the user, pulling data from a local sqlite database. People have suggested using Blazor Server, however I've spent three days going through dozens of tutorial from both Microsoft and others and have ended up giving up on each and every one, usually because of what seems to be significant version differences in the tutorial and the currently available.

I've found a few downloadable example projects, however these all contain huge numbers of files and code to do something as simple as present a basic todo list, and trying to work out what the thing is doing without documentation is extremely difficult.

I'm hoping someone here can recommend some basic tutorials that are up to date with the current releases and show how to get a basic CRUD example up.

Please and thank you!

 

[cjard]

I think the ChatGPT idea was an excellent suggestion. Just using your example exactly as you wrote it gave me the basic example code I needed to better understand the framework. I never thought I'd use AI to help explain a programming task to me!

It's genuinely one of the most useful things I've come across on recent years and I've asked all my team at work to start using it to get a leg up on basic problems. The data it was trained on isn't bang up to date; powerful as it is it's needed a year to read the entire Internet I guess, so occasionally it will write stuff that is complete cobblers but it's obvious when its code doesn't work. You can have an enduring conversation with it and ask for adjustments, and if you get into using a controls library like MudBlazor or Blazorise (which does make for a very nice development experience with Blazor) it even understands that..

I also like to ask it "in c# I would do xxx to achieve yyy; how do I do that in php?" or "what is the php equivalent of c#'s xxx?" to help relate what I know already to the language I have to use

StackOverflow have banned its use, chiefly because it's good at answering the basic questions that have already been answered on SO that should be closed as duplicates, and it's quite good at answering questions that don't belong on SO, ones that ask for too much design input and implementation. We're similarly "not a code writing service" but were prepared to write more than SO are, so I guess the spectrum is there from SO's help with a one liner, through us, to CGPT being willing to write the whole thing

 

[Skydiver]

The data it was trained on isn't bang up to date; powerful as it is it's needed a year to read the entire Internet I guess

And there is some brewing controversy regarding the up-to-date part as well. Ask it who the CEO of Twitter is, and it will respond that it is Elon Musk. Ask it who the current monarch of England is, and it responds with Charles. How could it have possibly known that if it was only supposedly trained with data up to 2021, and that it supposedly does not learn through conversations with regular users. If you press it for how it knows, it then claims that it made a mistake and that it has only been trained with data up to 2021. The company is now saying that they may have accidentally trained it with more current data while working on improving its conversation skills. They maintain that it does not learn from regular users.

 

[baylf2000]

And there is some brewing controversy regarding the up-to-date part as well. Ask it who the CEO of Twitter is, and it will respond that it is Elon Musk. Ask it who the current monarch of England is, and it responds with Charles. How could it have possibly known that if it was only supposedly trained with data up to 2021, and that it supposedly does not learn through conversations with regular users. If you press it for how it knows, it then claims that it made a mistake and that it has only been trained with data up to 2021. The company is now saying that they may have accidentally trained it with more current data while working on improving its conversation skills. They maintain that it does not learn from regular users.

I guess they've fixed that?

 

[Skydiver]

Nope still broken. Elon didn't become CEO until late 2022. He didn't offer to buy Twitter until April 2022. How could it have known if all training data was prior to 2021?

 

[Skydiver]

Anyway, back on the topic of your app. Now what you more or less understand Blazor, how exactly do you plan on hosting your Blazor app on the desktop? Is your plan to deploy the Blazor app + plus a batch file (.CMD or .PS) or shortcut link that launches a web browser? Or are planning on creating a shell application that just hosts a web browser?

You say that you need an embedded web server? Why? Does that mean other people at Starbucks or the home office can also access that Blazor app from their machines? What does the web server buy you?