At work I was asked to create and deploy a new .NET 8 Blazor app to an Azure Static Web App.

I’m brand new to Blazor, and brand new to Azure Static Web Apps, so I had a few stumbling blocks.

One of them was that I was getting this error when deploying via Azure Pipelines (using the AzureStaticWebApp@0 task):

Failed to find a default file in the app artifacts folder. Valid default files: index.html,Index.html.

The root cause of this was that when I created my Blazor app, I did so in Visual Studio 2022 using the “Blazor Web App” project template:

I should have instead used the “Blazor WebAssembly Standalone App” project template:

This was an easy newbie mistake to make, because:

1. The Blazor Web App template is suggested immediately, I didn’t need to search for it. I didn’t know the WebAssembly Standalone App template exists, until I searched for “Blazor” in the New project search box.
2. The Blazor Web App template includes options to choose the Interactive Render Mode, and WebAssembly is one of them, so I thought I was choosing doing the correct option for an Azure Static Web app.

More instructions are on Thomas Gauvin’s blog post.

Here’s some more thoughts I have on Static Web Apps so far, particularly the AzureStaticWebApp@0 Pipeline task.

1. I don’t like the deployment model, i.e. how it deploys from your source repo directly. I prefer a traditional Build Artifact approach, because a Build Artifact is a set in stone and can be deployed to another environment. Deploying from source feels wishy-washy.
2. I also don’t like how the it needs a unique deployment token to deploy to it, via the azure_static_web_apps_api_token parameter. Why can’t it use the same parameters as other tasks, i.e. AzureFunctionApp@2, which takes azureSubscription and appName parameters.