Why .NET Is Overlooked in China: A Deep Dive into Blazor and Flutter Web

Preface

There is a flood of articles covering popular technologies from beginner to expert levels; this piece instead looks at less‑discussed, “cold” technologies from a different angle.

Popular vs. Cold

Commonly seen topics include front‑end UI frameworks (Vue3, React, Angular), Node.js web frameworks (Koa, Express, Nest.js, Fastify), desktop app frameworks (Electron, Tauri), graphics (WebGL, WebVR, WebAR, three.js), audio‑video (WebRTC), TensorFlow.js, front‑end tooling (Webpack, esbuild, swc, Vite), Rust, cross‑platform frameworks (React Native, uniapp, Flutter), and hot concepts like Web3, blockchain, and smart contracts.

These topics are abundant online, but popularity does not equal superiority, and obscurity does not mean inferiority. Let’s explore some technologies that are not as popular domestically.

.Net Framework/.Net Core/.Net 5/6

What Is .Net?

.NET is a free, cross‑platform, open‑source developer platform for building many types of applications, including web, mobile, desktop, games, and IoT, using languages such as C#, F#, or Visual Basic.

Despite its versatility, .NET is not widely adopted in China’s internet industry.

Not Popular in Domestic Internet Companies

While many enterprises (including large ones like NetEase) use .NET, its adoption is concentrated in non‑internet sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, and software outsourcing, leading to low discussion volume.

According to the 2021 StackOverflow Developer Survey, ASP.NET Core ranked second among the most loved web frameworks, and .NET was the most loved framework overall, surpassing even Flutter.

.NET remains popular abroad but is relatively unknown among Chinese internet developers.

Evolution from Framework to Core to .Net

From 2000 to 2014 Microsoft focused on .NET Framework, releasing ASP.NET, WCF, WF, etc. With the rise of Java and PHP around 2009, Microsoft open‑sourced ASP.NET MVC but could not regain market share. In 2015 Microsoft launched the cross‑platform, open‑source .NET Core. .NET Core 3.0 (2019) stabilized the platform, and in 2020 the .NET brand unified the product line, releasing .NET 5.0 and later .NET 6.0 as the long‑term support version.

Blazor

Blazor is a .NET web‑application framework that lets developers build responsive UI without writing JavaScript.

<div class="card" style="width:22rem">
    <div class="card-body">
        <h3 class="card-title">@Title</h3>
        <p class="card-text">@ChildContent</p>
        <button @onclick="OnYes">Yes!</button>
    </div>
</div>
@code {
    [Parameter]
    public RenderFragment? ChildContent { get; set; }

    [Parameter]
    public string? Title { get; set; }
    private void OnYes()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Write to the console in C#! 'Yes' button selected.");
    }
}

Blazor WebAssembly

Blazor WebAssembly runs .NET code in the browser via WebAssembly, a compressed bytecode format optimized for fast download and execution. It works in all modern browsers, including mobile browsers.

JavaScript interop allows the WebAssembly‑based .NET code to access the full browser API, while the sandbox protects against malicious client‑side actions. The main drawback is the relatively large download size due to required libraries.

Blazor Server

Blazor Server renders components on the server, sends a binary representation of the UI to the client, and updates the UI via a SignalR connection. This model reduces client‑side processing but incurs higher latency and bandwidth usage for non‑local deployments.

Flutter Web

While Flutter is well known for iOS/Android cross‑platform apps, Flutter Web targets the browser using two rendering approaches.

HTML Rendering uses standard HTML, CSS, Canvas, and SVG, resulting in smaller bundle sizes.

CanvasKit Rendering compiles Skia to WebAssembly and renders via WebGL, offering consistent performance across desktop and mobile browsers at the cost of a larger bundle (~2 MB).

Flutter Web shares the same framework layer with Flutter Native, re‑implementing the dart:ui layer to map Flutter’s UI to the DOM and Canvas. The mature dart2js tool converts Dart code to JavaScript for execution in browsers.

References

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/zh-cn/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/387386242