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Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#41

Post by criddell »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #11

At a previous agency job, I was on a project that was re-writing an iOS and Android app used by millions of people. We looked hard into using Xamarin for this but in the end concluded that it was not ready yet. This was in 2019. Main reasons were: - You can use Xamarin.Forms to write cross-platform UI, but our UI was complicated enough (a weather app with lots of custom UI) that Xamarin.Forms would not have worked fo…

> Thankfully in the end we just split up into 2 teams and wrote the app in native iOS and Android.

When you have millions of users, that's definitely the right call.

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#42

Post by andix »

jjnoakes wrote: post #28
andix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still build a simple webview wrapper and put it to the App Store.

Not really. See 4.2. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...

If it is „app like“ that’s enough for the App Store. It can’t be just a browser for a desktop website for example.

It’s all about functionality and UX, not about technology.

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#43

Post by nso »

DonnyV wrote: post #39
jayd16 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Buggy features on certain platforms or something else?

It doesn't run on Linux. Not sure how they can call it "cross platform" if it doesn't run on Linux. Maybe across Microsoft's platform.

Across Microsoft's platform? It runs on iOS, macOS and Android.

Linux desktop is a insignificant dwarf compared to the forementioned. It's also super fragmented (what is linux desktop anyways?) and hence a ton of work to have something reliable working there. It's easy to understand why it has not been included as a first-class citizen for MAUI.

dotnet core is also open source and runs perfectly on linux, but again -- desktop no bueno.

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#44

Post by kasajian »

Without third-party libraries and/or frameworks, you can't target the same desktop applications that Electron can. For instance, .NET didn't have a cross-platform desktop offering until the last few months with the introduction of MAUI, which supports both Windows and MacOS, but not Linux.

However, if you go outside of what Microsoft offers directly, there's many options, some of which do something similar to Electron. Two off the top of list is the Uno Platform and Photino. There's others. They come and go.

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#46

Post by ducharmdev »

n8cpdx wrote: post #23
ducharmdev wrote: post #18

As a .NET developer that's focused mostly on web development (e.g. APIs + SPAs), I've not been very eager to wade into the pool of XAML that is .NET desktop/mobile frameworks. But I'm becoming more optimistic with the introduction of Blazor Hybrid. Whether you're using MAUI for mobile & desktop, or WPF/WinForms for just desktop, Blazor Hybrid provides you a web view that enables usage of Razor components made of C#,…

How is the performance? I was tempted to do some blazor work after trying some blazor demos on my M1 Mac. Then I tried it on my not-that-old Xeon windows desktop and it was unusably slow. It can run Google Earth and Visual Studio (and a whole bunch of electron apps) just fine, so my assumption was that Blazor is actually just bad.

When you say performance, are we talking about the tooling, running the app itself, or both? Also were you using Blazor Server, WASM or Hybrid?

Personally I've not run into any big issues like that; although my work laptop is pretty beefy, I did my side project on an old laptop that can't handle really large .NET solutions (e.g. crashes every 10-30 seconds simply navigating the Roslyn codebase...), but it did okay with Maui + Blazor Hybrid.

Alternatively, I think it's possible to use vscode if you're friendly with the dotnet cli, but I had trouble getting the workloads to work correctly and didn't wanna fuss with it at the time.

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#47

Post by guhidalg »

romanhn wrote: post #34

I recently spoke with the tech lead of a team that is all in on .NET for web development, as well as using Xamarin.Forms to develop cross-platform mobile apps. While this achieved their goals, the lead felt that the complexity of dealing with platform-specific edge cases slowed them down enough that developing using native tooling would have taken the same amount of time. He would not choose Xamarin again if faced wi…

This and other stories reinforces my belief that Kolmogorov complexity in software is a real thing(tm) and cross-platform GUI tooling will never be good enough to avoid having to write platform-specific code.

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#48

Post by kolbe »

DonnyV wrote: post #39
jayd16 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Buggy features on certain platforms or something else?

It doesn't run on Linux. Not sure how they can call it "cross platform" if it doesn't run on Linux. Maybe across Microsoft's platform.

It's for front-end development. There are ~0% use cases for a linux UI outside of development tools and maybe database monitoring tools?

Re: Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

#50

Post by brtkdotse »

n8cpdx wrote: post #32

Microsoft stopped development (more or less) around May 2020 to focus on MAUI, which was released in November 2020. Actually it wasn’t - MAUI wasn’t released until May 2022, tooling was just released July 2022 for Windows, and VS for Mac with proper support has yet to be released. If you’re used to command line that may not seem like a big deal, but the whole point of the .NET ecosystem is that you have a rich set of…

What’s your opinion on WinForms? I’ve yet to come across anything that’s better in terms of perf, developer experience and stability.
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