Thursday, June 26, 2025

Blazor Server Website does not work with AT&T Mobile Data

Stack Overflow did not like my question so I am posting it here.

I have created a Blazor Server Website using .NET 8.

Forms and the localization do not work with AT&T Mobile Data. The site works with Verizon, T-Mobile, and WiFi. Has anyone else built a Blazor Server application that works on AT&T mobile data?

Here is the site: http://gregfinzer2-001-site3.ctempurl.com/

Here is the code: https://github.com/GregFinzer/BedBrigadeNational

To reproduce the issue, on the home page change from English to Spanish. On AT&T Mobile data it does not change to Spanish. On everything else, it works.

Here is what fails:

Samsung S25+ with Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and Edge on AT&T Mobile Data fails
Samsung S25 with Chrome on AT&T Mobile Data fails
Samsung S21 on AT&T Mobile Data fails with Chrome (in Puerto Rico)
Motorola G using Chrome with AT&T Mobile Data Hotspot Fails
Samsung Tab A7 Lite on Chrome and AT&T Mobile Data Hotspot Fails
Laptop on AT&T Mobile Data Hotspot Fails

These works:

Desktop on WiFi
Android on WiFi
iPhone 16 Pro on WiFi
Google Pixel 5 with Verizon Mobile Data
Samsung S21 on T-Mobile Mobile Data

I have tried clearing the cache. The Motorola G was a brand new phone that I bought for testing and that did not work the first time. I have also tried the Chrome Inspect with the phone connected to my desktop PC. The inspect does not load at all. I also tried installing the DevTools for Firefox on Android. There are no console errors.

Another test is that if you click Bed Brigade near me, the search form is just completely missing with Android and AT&T mobile data. Anything else you will see a search form. Type in 43228 for the zip code to see the result.

New Information

I connected my laptop to the AT&T mobile data hotspot and now I am actually able to see an error in the Chrome developer tool console when the website loads: Uncaught (in promise) SyntaxError: Unexpected token '�', "�" is not valid JSON

I went through several different attempts at fixes with ChatGPT including changing it to only use WebSockets, attempting to use a _Host.cshtml in Blazor 8, and doing long polling.

Here is the conversation with ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/6851886e-1fb0-8005-a475-421c708d2a56

Here are the PRs with the attempted changes:

Answer

The problem was that the AT&T mobile data proxy was compressing the event stream. So I disabled the compression of the event stream and it worked:

//Add this right before builder.Services.AddServerSideBlazor
builder.Services.AddResponseCompression(options =>
{
    // Exclude SSE so it's never compressed
    options.MimeTypes = ResponseCompressionDefaults.MimeTypes
        .Except(new[] { "text/event-stream" });
});

//Add this right before app.UseStaticFiles()
app.UseResponseCompression();

Here is the PR:

https://github.com/GregFinzer/BedBrigadeNational/pull/520/files

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

What is the difference between a Junior and Senior Developer?

On Quora I've seen this question asked quite frequently: What is the difference between a junior developer and a senior developer? It is more than just years of experience. One of my co-workers was looking at a potential candidate for hire. He said that this person has 5 years of experience but he is still a junior. He repeated the beginner year of experience five times. This begs the question; what skills should a junior developer have? Whether you have completed a computer science bachelors degree, gone through a boot camp, or are self taught, these skills are essential for the basics:

Junior Developer

Operating system basics
Networking basics
Digital device basics
Programming basics
Cloud computing basics
Data structures and algorithms
Object oriented programming
Mobile device programming
Database basics
Infrastructure security
Cybersecurity
AI driven coding
Debugging
Database applications

Mid-Level Developer

A mid-level developer has at least two years of experience in either the front end or the back end. A key indicator that a developer has reached this level is that they no longer ask the team lead for help. In fact they may be helping other junior developers.

Backend Skills

Language: C# or Java
Backend Framework: .NET Core or Spring Boot
ORM: Entity Framework or Hibernate
Database Language: SQL
Backend Unit Testing: NUnit or JUnit
Backend Mocking: MOQ or Mockito
API Testing: Postman or RestAssured
Cloud Technologies: AWS or Azure
File Formats: JSON, YAML, XML
Technologies: GIT, JIRA, Azure DevOps
Principles: SCRUM, Kanban, REST, Microservices, SOA, Estimation
IDE: Visual Studio, Rider or IntelliJ IDEA

Frontend Skills

Language: JavaScript and TypeScript
Frameworks: VueJS, React, Angular, Blazor, or ASP.NET MVC
HTML
CSS
CSS Frameworks: Less, SASS, Bootstrap, Tailwind
Front End Unit Testing: Jasmine or Jest
File Formats: JSON, YAML, XML
Technologies: GIT, NPM, NODE, JIRA, Azure DevOps
Principles: SCRUM, Kanban, REST, Microservices, SOA, Estimation
IDE: VSCode

Senior Developer

A senior developer is a full stack developer. They normally have at least 5 years of experience. They have mastered the front end, the back end, databases, unit testing, integration testing, GUI testing, and cloud technologies. They have also learned and are using design patterns. They adhere to the solid design principles and create clean code. They are able to build deployment pipelines. Here are the additional skills for a senior developer.

Design Patterns
SOLID Design Principles
Test Driven Development
Multithreaded Development
Memory and Performance Optimization
Load Testing
Continuous Integration
SAFE
DevOps
GUI Testing: Playwright or Cypress
Pipelines: Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and GitHub Actions
N-Tier Architecture
Onion Architecture
Clean Architecture
Hexagonal Architecture
Serverless Architecture
CQRS
Microservices Architecture

Architect

There used to be only one meaning of the word Architect, a Software Architect. However now there are four meanings. The Software Architect is at the application level, establishing the architecture of the application, the initial design patterns, creating feature designs, establishing coding standards, establishing testing standards, creating the onboarding process, creating the development process, GIT branching strategy, performance standards, and best practices. If there is no SCRUM master, the Software Architect also becomes the SCRUM master. If there is no DevOps Engineer, the Software Architect sets up all of the build and deployment pipelines. The Cloud Architect, is familiar with all the services for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. They know how everything is configured and how to pass data between the different services. They script it all with Terraform. The Infrastructure Architect plans and implements physical data centers. The Enterprise Architect plans how systems will interact at the enterprise level typically using TOGAF.

So how do you learn all of these skills? Primarily I use a combination of YouTube, Udemy, and Cheatography. You can also ask ChatGPT to explain each concept to you.

This is a great article by my friend Jonathan Danylko about the difference between knowledge and experience:

Please Adjust your Personal Expectation Meter | DanylkoWeb

Monday, October 14, 2024

Localization in Blazor

Here are the lessons that I learned while performing the translation to Spanish for The Bed Brigade National website. I created documentation specific for our project.

If you have a brownfield project, you have to find all of the strings that need to be localized in your Razor files. I ended up creating logic to do this.
You have to localize any validation messages. I still wanted to use DataAttributes for validation so I ended up writing some custom code to pull out the validation messages and then more custom logic to actually do the validation and get the translation.
The need to do partial translations. Sometimes dropdown lists, enums, or other dynamic content can be partially translated. I created code to do this.
Content Management System translations. We are seeding our whole site so that when you run it locally or you deploy it to a new environment you have data to work with. So the content can be pre-translated. However once the user changes words on the page, we need to check if we can translated it using what we have already translated, if not we need to queue it for translation.
Translators cannot handle weird line feeds in the middle of your content. I like to format my HTML before I save it and this does not affect the browser rendering at all. However the language translators have no idea what you are doing and will return back strange translations. So you have to replace all tabs, and line feeds with spaces.
There is one free translator available. It is slow but it works.

Before embarking on localization in Blazor I watched most of the videos on YouTube relating to localization. Basically there are two options, the traditional resource .resx files that have been around since WinForm days and resource files using YAML. I would encourage you to watch both of these videos:

I chose the second option; the multilanguages open source project to perform localization. I contributed a bunch of new features to this project which I originally created for the Bed Brigade National website. The main reason why I chose it was for its ability to translate the YAML files into 69 different languages. Although my wife speaks Spanish, she did not have to translate a single word for our website.

Bed Brigade is a charity and I did not want to break the bank on translations. We ended up going with the free API Layer translator service. Since everything on the entire site is pre-translated with resource files, it is only when the user adds or changes content that we might need to translate something.

Here are the other options for translating text dynamically if you have a content management system on your site.