We’ve reached the final day of our OCC 2022 Dev Camp blog.
Persisting the cached data
We wrote earlier in the week about our ability to cache the database locally, which enables users to work offline. This was an in-memory cache and it only worked if the app was started when online. Today we corrected this by adding local storage to both the web browser and the Blazor Desktop application.
Dynamic data structures
We also found a use case that works better in JavaScript than Blazor. We set ourselves the challenge of adding extra columns to our forms through configuration, rather than them being hardcoded into the model. This required the use of dynamic types in C#, which was much harder because C# is a strongly typed language. If we wanted to do this again in future, we would recommend JavaScript where types are much looser.
Flutter on Windows
In our custom software development team, we use a wide range of different technologies. For mobile applications, we have 3 available options:
- Flutter – Google’s cross-platform app framework, which produces consistently good-looking apps across both Android and iOS
- Xamarin.Forms – Microsoft’s cross-platform app framework, which allows us to reuse our C# code on mobile devices
- React Native – Facebook supported app framework, which allows us to harness the power of React to build highly custom user interfaces. This technology requires the most input on our part
We were excited today to read that Flutter is coming to Windows, so it will now be able to support Windows Store apps, just like Xamarin.
End of Dev Camp
We’re now at the end of our Dev Camp week. We built our application. We may not have built a UI that resembles the designs the UX team mocked up. Nor have we proved to the junior devs that us seniors can build websites faster than them(!). We were focused on testing new features of the frameworks; building a quality product takes time. However, the Dev Camp was a big success and we were able to put new technologies through their paces.
So would we recommend using the 3 technologies we tested?
- Blazor – recommended
- Blazor desktop – recommended
- MAUI – come back next year
In due course we will be publishing more detailed findings on these 3 technologies.