As part of an upcoming piece of work, it was suggested to me that I spend some time getting familiar with Tailwind CSS. I’d heard good things from colleagues, one comment in particular suggesting it doesn’t hold you back like other CSS frameworks. So I was quite keen to dig in and see what was so special about it.

I took some time to investigate developing a MAUI mobile app that shares business logic with a Blazor web app by way of ViewModels and the like. What I discovered was that MAUI and XAML is a pretty cumbersome framework. My colleague Kael gave me some insight on the possibility of building a Blazor app and running that as a MAUI app. After looking into it in more detail I came to the conclusion that having a single application with multiple deployment targets is a more practical approach to cross-platform development. This article serves as a guide to developing a single application that can be deployed as both a website and an Android app. Of course there are a few platform specific things to look out for but they’re easily handled as I will demonstrate in this post.

Fluxor is a Flux implementation for Blazor in the vein of Redux. It is a state management system designed for larger software systems that encourages immutability of state, pure functions and clean separation of code. Given my fairly basic understanding of the Flux pattern I thought it would be valuable to document what it is at a high level and what’s required when using Fluxor to implement the various concepts.

MVVM is a development pattern that has been around for a while now. It was designed to facilitate the development of WPF applications for Windows and is still used for the likes of Maui apps. I reckon it has a place in Blazor apps as a neat way to separate view from logic, and as a sort of volatile state management for when you don’t want state to persist between pages.

A published Blazor WebAssembly instance is just a collection of files that can be loaded into a browser. If these files are hosted on the API, running the API means the UI is running as well, probably from the same address. In this case it’s a little different to debug compared to launching it standalone, but not any more complicated.