Making a Blog with C# - Part 2

Hosting on Azure

Blazor Server or WASM

Blazor is a given, but whether to use Blazor Server or Web Assembly was a hard choice. I started out with Blazor WASM, but got a bit overwhelmed by all the unknowns, and limitations, and switched to Blazor Server. I work with dotnet 6 worker services, so Blazor Server felt like the more comfortable choice.

Hosting

I decided on using Azure for hosting - it feels like the natural choice for dotnet, and I've used it a bit in the past. So I created a pay-as-you-go subscription, and a resource group, hoping that'd be enough to get me started. A little googling had shown me that I'd need to use both Azure App Service and Azure SignalR Services for a Blazor Server app, and that I should be able to provision it through Visual Studio when publishing inititally. Here are the docs I used: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/host-and-deploy/server?view=aspnetcore-6.0

Provisioning

Azure SignalR Service

The first thing I had to do was add a Service Dependency to Azure SignalR Service through Visual Studio:

• Right-clicked on the project and clicked Publish
• Clicked the Connected Services tab on the left, and then +
• Found Azure SignalR Service in the list, and completed the steps to provision it

I started out saving the generated connection string in Azure KeyVault, but I had trouble launching the app locally after that, and switched to using a local secret.json file.

Azure App Service

Next up: Provisioning the App Service that was going to host the Blazor website. I did the following to set that up:

• Right-clicked on the project and clicked Publish (again)
• Selected Azure as target and clicked next
• Selected Azure App Service (Linux)
• Clicked + Create new
• Completed the steps to provision the Azure App Service
  • I configured deployment to be through GitHub actions, so Visual Studio created a workflow yml for me 👌

When it was created, I went into Configuration and added AzureSignalRConnectionString as an Application Setting. I chose Application Setting over Connection string to have it injected as an environment variable. I knew that'd work, and I wasn't sure if adding it as a Connection string would just work out of the box.

Summary

I decided on using Blazor Server instead of WASM, and Azure for hosting. What I ended up with was the following resources in Azure:

• SignalR Service (Free-tier)
• App Service (Free-tier)