PokerTime: a planning poker app built in ASP.NET Core and Blazor

By now the new corona virus, or SARS-CoV2, has spread around the world like a pandemic. Sadly, many people in the Netherlands are infected as well. My employer has asked everyone who can work from home, to do so. As for myself, I also had a bit of a cough so I didn’t mind staying indoors. With not much to do and a new sprint starting on monday, I went on to creating a planning poker application. Introducing: PokerTime, a realtime collaborative planning poker app built in ASP.NET Core and Blazor.

This is how it looks:

Features

The app contains a basic set of features to allow real-time estimations:

• Realtime app, ideal for remote teams. We already had a test run on last monday and it worked perfectly!
• Create password protected poker sessions
• As facilitator, lead the poker session through the discussion and estimation.

Architecture

I have based this application on Return, so I refer to the general architecture of Return for more information.

To summarize it: It has been built using CQRS and a test-driven approach.

Blazor

As a UI framework I used Blazor. This is the first time I’ve used Blazor so I certainly had some lessons to learn. Blazor is a - in my case - framework that runs on the server and maintains a persistent connection with the client using web sockets. This has some impact on that might catch you by suprise.

Where to download and view the source

I have published the source code under GPLv3.0 on Github.