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.NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

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Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#141
Lately I've been using AvaloniaUI ( https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia ) for all new projects. For most intents and purposes it is much easier to make single UI codebase work across platforms when behavior and look of components does not depend on quirks of native controls (which MAUI wraps).

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#142
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Colleges have been teaching Visual Basic as a starter programming language for decades. Where? In the US, university-level intro to programming would have been in Lisp, Forth, C, C++, and/or Java before possibly trying something else in the mid 2000s, but I struggle to imagine an American university strong in CS touching anything in the VB namespace (5, 6, .NET) whatsoever.

You struggle to imagine because you went elitist. "University level strong in CS", I said college. A lot of colleges teach Visual Basic. No, Ivy League schools might not, but a lot of colleges do. Heck, my community college taught a class for kids on it in the late 90s (my intro to programming) and still teaches college students a VB track today.

Well hey, I personally took a C programming course at the local community college, way back when, and have never met someone who learned VB outside of business/industry. Same way that Excel+VBScript are very useful but not taught as CS, but perhaps are covered in business classes. It occurred to me that your use of "college" might be the non-US meaning.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your bar is for "experimental", but Flutter is one of the most popular UI toolkits out there, with many 100m+ MAU apps using it, including tens from Google itself. It's already shipped a 2.0 release, has 15,000+ packages on the pub.dev package server, is the framework Ubuntu has settled on for new desktop apps, has hundreds of active contributors, and is one of the top ten OSS projects on GitHub. "E…

Some people think like this: if i write an app and come back in 10 years, is it still going to work, compile, and be possible to update? By that benchmark very few platforms are acceptable, and they are mostly first party. That standard makes sence if you have a rigid hardware-like approach

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for certain platforms. I've spent a lot of my career working with enterprise customers, some of whom are comfortably running 20 year old software written with something like WPF. And in general, that would be true of Flutter too -- on a platform like Windows, it will work at least as long as the underlying Win32 APIs are available.

(Of course, that's not a viable test for most mobile frameworks. I suspect that an iOS Xcode project from 2011 would not run without rework, nor an app written for Android Honeycomb.)

Flutter is open source, which provides some automatic measure of protection against obsolescence. And companies like Toyota who are building it into embedded systems like cars that will still be around in 20+ years.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#145
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python and VB target very different audiences, is there something I'm missing here? Python is an interpreted dynamic language that turns into an unwieldy monster at scale, I believe VB was mostly fighting for Fortran and web devs.

Wasn't VB.NET an attempt to get VB6 guys on .NET?

It was, but never really became relevant because most people switched to C# + WinForms and never looked back.

As there was never (as far as I know) an easy way to migrate existing apps from VB6 to VB.NET, the main reason to use VB.NET would have been a preference for the BASIC syntax, which I don't think was ever particularly common, this was always just a loud minority. And a significant part of this minority also didn't like VB.NET because even this was too different from what they were used to.

Keep in mind the only 2 good GUI tools at the time, IIRC, were VB6 and Delphi. VC++ and stuff like MFC was overly complicated, and the Java stuff was garbage. As neither VB6 nor Delphi used a C-family language, you had a lot of people using them just because it was a better tool, not because of a preference for the language.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#146
post #37

The amount of energy Microsoft is pouring into these front-end efforts is pretty incredible. A more recent development that has me very excited is Blazor Desktop: https://medium.com/young-coder/blazor-desktop-the-electron-f... > This leads to the second difference — in a Blazor Desktop app hosted in WebWindow, there’s no built-in web server. Instead, it’s pure .NET all the way down. And while we haven’t seen exactly…

I really changed my mind about Microsoft over the years in a positive way since they changed their attitude over everything that's not Windows based.

That's like saying someone would not like Apple because the support only iOS and macOS. Championing Windows really has never been the problem with MS.

It's the business practices why people generally have bad memories of them.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#147

No offense, but call me when there's any Linux desktop target option.

Even if they implement one, it will lag, and eventually break.

That is the current situation for Xamarin.Forms GTK and UWP backend.

For UWP they made promises for Maui, but GTK is still community owned.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#148
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, Tk is by far the best for targeting multiplatform desktop. Qt is a close second and Gtk is "sticks out like a sore thumb, but works" I don't think Tk runs on iOS, which is why Tk is usually disqualified in "multiplatform" recommendations MAUI and Xamarin.Forms both have "okay" linux support last time I checked.

To put the question a bit more nicely than my sibling, don't Tk apps all look... really bad? I don't know if I've ever seen a Tk app that tried to mimic native widgets at all. For example, the most prominent Tk application I'm aware of looks like this on Windows: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Scid_4.6... On Linux (where I use it), it looks even worse. While Qt doesn't use real native widgets on…

ttk (which was introduced in tcl 8.4, circa 2002) uses native widgets on Windows and Mac. The default theme on linux is ugly, but there are reasonable themes available.

There was an attempt at a GTK backend for ttk on linux, but apparently there were technical difficulties so it was abandoned.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#149
post #37

The amount of energy Microsoft is pouring into these front-end efforts is pretty incredible. A more recent development that has me very excited is Blazor Desktop: https://medium.com/young-coder/blazor-desktop-the-electron-f... > This leads to the second difference — in a Blazor Desktop app hosted in WebWindow, there’s no built-in web server. Instead, it’s pure .NET all the way down. And while we haven’t seen exactly…

Have you tried Flutter Web instead? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-scre...

Maui is targeting React Native and Flutter. Same for Blazer with Electron. They make this attempts to bring C# everywhere. Using Flutter, Angular or setting else is the context switch they try to avoid.

For me, as a .NET fanboy, they are a year or two late.

Re: .NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

#150

Basically MAUI is the next phase of Xamarin/UWP as that was not fully ported on the UI side in .NET 5 which was the merging of .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 3.1. .NET 6 UI is essentially being replaced with this for .NET 6. I use Xamarin/UWP quite a bit for apps that also have to target Surface and it is great, the ability to use Xamarin.Forms and/or use CustomRenderers per platform is nice. This should follow sim…

I think there’s some possibility of slight confusion by mixing Xamarin and UWP together. Xamarin (and thus .NET MAUI, which is cross platform) does not use the same flavor of XAMl as UWP (and thus WinUI, which is Windows only but shares the same XAML as Uno).
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