React + .NET Core + SignalR = Amazing!

Simple, lightweight, yet powerful way to build real-time React + C# .NET Core web apps. Update: DotNetify-React released: Build Reactive MVVM Apps with React + SignalR .NET Core 2.1! I am thrilled to announce the beta for the project I’ve been doing to integrate with .NET Core. It’s called , and it makes it super easy to connect your React app with a .NET Core back-end, which you all know, can run everywhere: Windows, Linux and Mac. open source React dotNetify-React But not only that, your app will get real-time WebSockets capability for free! This project uses SignalR to get React components connected to the back-end view models. It doesn’t use the MVC pattern, there’s no web API to write, and no AJAX request to make from the React side. At its most basic form, you only need to declare a single API inside the React component’s constructor, and it will automatically hydrate the initial state on connect. connect Real-Time MVVM When a real-time app requires a stateful model, this is where dotNetify shows its key strength. Those back-end view models, they’re not merely anemic objects, but can be used to host application logic that you would otherwise write in Javascipt on the client-side. It is a true MVVM in a sense that a view model represents an abstraction of a view, containing both data and behavior to fulfill a use case. There is a slim controller on the back-end whose only job is to maintain view model instances while their associated views are up on the browser, and you can use your favorite IoC container (or fall back to ASP.NET Dependency Injection) to instantiate them. Combined with the ability to push data to the client in real-time, you have a real option . to make your app very back-end driven and to keep your front-end thin and dumb If you think this is a throwback to the IBM dumb terminal era and couldn’t possibly be scalable, hey, ! it’s been done in modern times, by no less a company than Spotify Get Running in Minutes I put in the some very simple steps on how to make a real-time “Hello World” app from scratch, using three different options: .NET Core CLI, Visual Studio 2017 + WebPack, or Facebook’s very own with Node.js and .NET Core. project’s website create-react-app The latter excites me the most given that is the official standard for creating new React app, boasting zero configurationbecause it just packs it all up for you in a very opinionated (but expert) manner. I like that the page reloads itself whenever a script file is updated, and there’s a way to add WebPack’s Hot Module Replacement feature so that the update will just re-render the component instead of full reload. create-react-app But what pleases me more is that we can do similar thing with .NET Core: any server-side file update will cause it to rebuild just by adding feature. Imagine the productivity boost we can get here: we can just skip the cycle of stopping, recompiling, rerunning and reloading the page whenever you do some code changes. dotnet watch To learn more and see well-fleshed-out live demos, please visit the and its . project’s website Github site My desire with this project is to get to a state that can support full-stack micro-service on .NET platform: the ability to have a complex web app composable of independent modules that can be worked on and deployed by completely autonomous teams with very minimal downtime. Sounds like a tall order? Hopefully not, because that’s really the way I’d like to work in the future! front+back-end