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.NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

avaloniaui.net

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Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#41
This is awesome… but: On the Web, is Avalonia using Skia to render inside a Skia Canvas?

**insert inception meme here**

Joking aside: this points to MSFT moving away from the whole Mono/Maui investments and into Aspire or whatever they call it. Without MSFT backing this I am not sure if there is much more future left for MAUI (or dotnet on mobile in general).

Avalonia is great though.

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#42

In the .NET ecosystem, I have noticed people to shame .NET MAUI because Microsoft themselves don't use this framework - Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI. Why build a product on MAUI when Microsoft aren't too sure about it.

Never build a frontend on a .NET technology. Period. They always end up unsupported in the end. Just use standard web technologies and thank yourself later. I've been a .NET dev for a decade now and that's what I've learnt.

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#43
post #6

This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web! One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything lar…

> I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink.

I was intrigued before I read this. This stuff is a non-starter for me.

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#45

In the .NET ecosystem, I have noticed people to shame .NET MAUI because Microsoft themselves don't use this framework - Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI. Why build a product on MAUI when Microsoft aren't too sure about it.

These days, I think Microsoft's web-based desktop apps mostly use WebView2 directly instead of Electron, so they don't have to bundle a browser. I think for Teams it happened at the same time that they moved from Angular to React.

The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET.

Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#46
post #7
post #6

This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web! One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything lar…

That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web. This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion. But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we c…

It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do.

I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today.

I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#47
post #27

Took more than a minute to load on my macbook. Ouch! I really love C# and the .net ecosystem, but they just haven't made it work for web.

Blazor is incredibly productive.

I wouldn't use it for consumer apps because it requires a Websocket connection to maintain state and probably doesn't scale very cheaply... but for business applications or personal tools it's actually kind of insane how much functionality you get out of the box (at least by the standards of statically typed languages).

To replicate this example in Typescript, I'd probably still be installing packages in the time it took to write the 20 lines of code it contains: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/compone...

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#48
post #6

This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web! One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything lar…

Let's move the goalposts downfield. If you can't go into developer mode and mess with the DOM, and JS, it's not real web.

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#49

A toolkit announcing “Linux support” is pretty ambiguous. Does it mean Xorg support? Wayland support? Framebuffer support? The announcement provides no clue about this.

Since it's using Avalonia, I'd say it's just X support at the moment. They've announced that they intend to support Wayland, but that was a couple months ago[1], so I doubt that's ready.

[1]: https://avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-wayland-support-to-aval...

Re: .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

#50

In the .NET ecosystem, I have noticed people to shame .NET MAUI because Microsoft themselves don't use this framework - Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI. Why build a product on MAUI when Microsoft aren't too sure about it.

Never build a frontend on a .NET technology. Period. They always end up unsupported in the end. Just use standard web technologies and thank yourself later. I've been a .NET dev for a decade now and that's what I've learnt.

Except WinForms, spectacular for Windows-only utility GUIs.
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