Introduction

The StellarAdmin Tag Helpers is a suite of ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers that allows you to rapidly create beautiful CRUD screens for ASP.NET Core MVC and Razor Pages applications.

I created StellarAdmin first and foremost for myself. I spent a lot of time over the past few years in the React world and have been impressed with the wonderfully rich ecosystem of component libraries that are available on that side of the fence - libraries such as shadcn/ui, Mantine, and dozens of others.

However, the truth is that most of the applications I work on are simple CRUD applications. They do not need any React. In fact, they need very little JavaScript - if any at all. They can be written in good old MVC and Razor Pages.

Unfortunately, MVC and Razor Pages do not have any modern free UI libraries available. You're stuck to using a dated UI like Bootstrap.

So, I set out to change that, and thus StellarAdmin was born.

StellarAdmin is based on the popular shadcn/ui library, using Tailwind for the CSS. I am not a designer and did not want to spend too much time recreating the wheel, so I lifted most of the styling and component structures from shadcn/ui as-is. I just converted it to work in the ASP.NET Core world with Tag Helpers.

The advantage of that - besides the fact that your UI will look good - is that you can take advantage of things like the shadcn/ui theming system and use sites like tweakcn to find existing themes or build your own.

I understand MVC and Razor Pages is not everyone's cup of tea, but if this approach vibes with you, welcome to the club!