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Blazor Without the Bloat: Building “Power Inputs” with Plain HTML

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  When starting to build forms in Blazor, it's common to immediately reach for a third-party component library. Date pickers, masked inputs, sliders, validation UI, file upload widgets – the list goes on. While these libraries can be incredibly useful, they also come with tradeoffs: extra dependencies, styling constraints, larger downloads, and the need to learn a new component API that often duplicates what browsers already do well. This post serves as a powerful reminder that modern HTML inputs are already "power controls." With Blazor, you can wire them up with minimal C# code while retaining all the benefits of native browser behavior. The result? Simple, fast, dependency-free UI that still feels modern and responsive. The Core Idea: Let the Browser Do the Work This approach demonstrates a wide range of input types using plain HTML, leveraging the browser's native capabilities: type="email" for native email validation type="ur...
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Mastering Blazor Development in VS Code with AI Instruction Files

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  From Boilerplate to Vibe Coding For years, serious Blazor development meant Visual Studio , long scaffolding sessions, and an uncomfortable amount of manual boilerplate. VS Code was “nice for quick edits,” but not where real Blazor work happened. That has changed. Today, VS Code + the C# Dev Kit + AI instruction files has quietly become one of the most powerful Blazor development environments available— if you know how to use it correctly. The shift isn’t just about tooling. It’s about who writes the code . You no longer write every line. You design the rules , and the AI executes. Welcome to vibe coding . The VS Code + Blazor Renaissance VS Code’s evolution into a first-class Blazor IDE happened in layers: C# Dev Kit brought proper project system awareness, debugging, and Razor support Razor tooling stabilized enough for real component work AI copilots moved from autocomplete to context-aware code generation The result? ...
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My newest best friend “Microsoft Copilot CLI”

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  The command line has always been the fastest way to work— if you already know exactly what to type. Microsoft Copilot CLI changes that equation completely. It brings Generative AI directly into your terminal , turning the shell into an intelligent collaborator instead of a memory test. This isn’t autocomplete. This isn’t docs-on-the-side. This is thinking, reasoning, and acting—without leaving your terminal . Let’s break it down. 1. What Is Copilot CLI? The Microsoft Copilot CLI is the bridge between terminal efficiency and AI-powered reasoning . Instead of jumping between your terminal, Chat Client, and documentation tabs, you stay focused—and let Copilot do the heavy lifting. At its core, Copilot CLI lets you: Ask questions in natural language Generate commands you don’t remember Understand commands you inherited Reason over local project files Interact with cloud and DevOps resources Getting It Most developers sta...
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Modern HTML Replaced Your UI Framework (You Just Didn’t Notice)

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You Don’t Need a UI Framework Anymore Modern HTML & CSS Are the UI Library For years, the default answer to “How do I build a UI?” has been: Use React Use Angular Use a component library like Telerik, MUI, or Bootstrap That advice made sense 10 years ago . It makes far less sense today. Modern HTML and CSS have quietly absorbed huge portions of what UI frameworks used to justify themselves for — and most teams haven’t noticed. This post shows how far plain HTML + CSS has come, how much payload you can avoid , and why building a native, framework-agnostic UI library is now not only possible — but often the better architectural choice. This is a continuation of a previous post, Beyond AI: Why HTML Elements Still Boost Productivity in Blazor The Hidden Cost of “Just Use a Framework” Before we even look at code, let’s talk about downloads . Typical UI stack sizes (approximate, min+gzip) Stack Download Size React + React DOM ~120–150 KB React + common UI libs 300–600 K...
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