Every few years, someone declares that Microsoft’s development stack is dead and we should all move to whatever’s currently fashionable. We’ve heard it about Java, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Go, and most recently Rust. Meanwhile, .NET keeps getting faster, more capable, and more pleasant to work with. We’ve been building on Microsoft technology for over fifteen years, and our commitment to the platform isn’t nostalgia — it’s a practical decision we revisit regularly.
Here’s why .NET and Blazor remain our technology of choice for enterprise application development, and where we think the honest trade-offs lie.
.NET Performance Is Genuinely Impressive
There was a time when .NET had a deserved reputation for being slower than alternatives. That time has passed. The .NET team at Microsoft has invested heavily in performance, and the benchmarks tell the story: .NET consistently places near the top of the TechEmpower framework benchmarks, competing with and often beating Go, Java, and Node.js in real-world scenarios.
More importantly, the performance improvements are in areas that matter for enterprise applications:
- JSON serialisation with
System.Text.Jsonis extremely fast and allocation-efficient - Minimal APIs can handle very high request volumes with low overhead
- Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation dramatically reduces startup times for containerised deployments
- Memory management improvements in recent .NET versions have reduced GC pause times significantly
For the enterprise applications we build — typically handling thousands of concurrent users with complex business logic — .NET gives us headroom that we simply don’t need to worry about. Performance bottlenecks, when they occur, are almost always in database queries or external service calls, not in the framework itself.
Why Blazor Works for Us
Blazor was a gamble when Microsoft first released it. A framework that lets you write interactive web UIs in C# instead of JavaScript? It sounded like it might be a solution looking for a problem. Several years in, we’re convinced it was the right bet for the kind of work we do.
Shared Code, Shared Types
The single biggest advantage of Blazor for enterprise development is sharing code between the server and the client. When your API returns a CustomerOrder object, the Blazor frontend uses the same CustomerOrder class. No mapping layer, no TypeScript interface that might drift out of sync, no runtime type errors because someone renamed a property on the backend but forgot to update the frontend.
// Shared model used by both API and UI
public class CustomerOrder
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Reference { get; set; } = string.Empty;
public DateTime OrderDate { get; set; }
public OrderStatus Status { get; set; }
public List<OrderLine> Lines { get; set; } = new();
public decimal Total => Lines.Sum(l => l.Quantity * l.UnitPrice);
}This class lives in a shared project. The API serialises it, the Blazor UI deserialises it, and the compiler catches any mismatches at build time. For enterprise applications with dozens of entities and complex business rules, this alone saves enormous amounts of time and eliminates an entire category of bugs.
Server vs WebAssembly vs Auto
Blazor offers three rendering modes, and we use different ones depending on the project:
Blazor Server keeps the UI logic on the server, sending DOM updates over a SignalR connection. It’s excellent for internal enterprise tools where all users are on a reliable network. The startup is instant, the download size is minimal, and you have full access to server-side resources without building an API layer.
Blazor WebAssembly (WASM) runs entirely in the browser. We use this for public-facing applications that need to work offline or where we want to minimise server load. The initial download is larger, but subsequent interactions are entirely client-side.
Blazor Auto (introduced in .NET 8) starts with server-side rendering for fast initial load, then transitions to WebAssembly for subsequent interactions. It’s the best of both worlds for many applications, though the mental model takes some getting used to.
For our job board platforms, we use a hybrid approach: server-rendered pages for SEO-critical content (job listings, employer profiles) with interactive Blazor components for search, filtering, and application forms.
C# Is a Genuinely Good Language
This might sound obvious, but it’s worth stating: C# is an excellent language for building complex business applications. It has evolved dramatically over the past few years, and modern C# is expressive, concise, and safe.
Features that make a tangible difference in our day-to-day work:
- Pattern matching simplifies complex conditional logic
- Records give us immutable data types with minimal boilerplate
- Nullable reference types catch null reference issues at compile time
- LINQ remains the best collection querying syntax in any mainstream language
- async/await was pioneered in C# and the implementation is mature and reliable
Compare this to JavaScript or TypeScript, where the type system is bolted on (TypeScript) or absent (JavaScript), null handling is a perpetual footgun, and the ecosystem changes direction every eighteen months. For enterprise applications that need to be maintained for five to ten years, C#‘s stability and backward compatibility are enormously valuable.
The Honest Comparison with Node.js and React
We’d be doing you a disservice if we pretended there were no scenarios where a Node.js/React stack makes more sense. Here’s our honest assessment:
Choose .NET and Blazor when:
- You’re building a complex business application with significant server-side logic
- Your team has C# experience (or is willing to invest in learning it)
- You need long-term maintainability and enterprise support
- Integration with other Microsoft services (Azure, SQL Server, Active Directory) is important
- You value type safety and compile-time checking
Consider Node.js/React when:
- You’re building a content-heavy, largely static site with some interactivity
- Your team is primarily JavaScript-focused
- You need access to specific npm packages that don’t have .NET equivalents
- Rapid prototyping speed matters more than long-term maintainability
- You’re targeting a startup environment where hiring JavaScript developers is easier
Where we think .NET has the edge: enterprise applications, complex business logic, applications that need to integrate with existing Microsoft infrastructure, and projects where long-term maintenance cost matters.
Where React has the edge: the sheer size of the JavaScript ecosystem, the availability of pre-built UI components, and the ease of hiring frontend developers who already know it.
Azure Integration
Most of our enterprise clients either already use Azure or are moving toward it. The integration between .NET and Azure services is seamless in a way that competing platforms can’t quite match:
- Azure App Service deployment is essentially one click from Visual Studio or a few lines in a CI/CD pipeline
- Azure SQL works identically to on-premises SQL Server
- Azure Active Directory integration for authentication is straightforward with the Microsoft Identity platform
- Application Insights gives you detailed telemetry with minimal configuration
- Azure DevOps provides a complete CI/CD pipeline that understands .NET projects natively
None of these are impossible with other stacks, but the level of integration and the quality of tooling is noticeably better when you stay within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Real-World Durability
We have .NET applications in production that have been running for over a decade. They’ve been upgraded through multiple .NET versions, and the migration path has been manageable each time. Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously, and the upgrade tooling improves with each release.
Compare this to the JavaScript ecosystem, where a project left untouched for two years often has dozens of deprecated dependencies, breaking changes in core libraries, and a build pipeline that no longer works. We’ve inherited several projects like this from other agencies, and the cost of getting them back to a healthy state is significant.
For enterprise clients who need their applications to run reliably for years, the stability of the .NET platform is a genuine competitive advantage.
It’s Not Perfect
Nothing is. Blazor’s debugging experience, while improved, still isn’t as polished as React’s developer tools. The Blazor community is smaller, which means fewer third-party components and fewer Stack Overflow answers when you hit an unusual problem. WebAssembly download sizes, though improving, are still larger than a comparable React application.
And .NET on Linux, while fully supported, occasionally reveals rough edges that you wouldn’t encounter on Windows. We’ve hit a few obscure issues with file path handling and culture-specific formatting that were clearly tested more thoroughly on Windows.
These are trade-offs we’re comfortable with. For the enterprise applications we build from our base in Dolgellau, .NET and Blazor give us the productivity, performance, and long-term reliability that our clients need. That’s not marketing — it’s fifteen years of experience talking.
