Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

.NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

avaloniaui.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 276 posts

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

#231

Post by thewebguyd »

gmueckl wrote: post #145
powersnail wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog. Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good;…

If it was a standard Windows dialog box by any chance, you could just have pressed Ctrl+C with the dialog in focus to copy the message. It's one of these subtle things that go almost completely overlooked.

There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron, and I'm increasingly frustrated by it as time goes on.

on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding."

It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions.

The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.

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

#232

Post by UnreachableCode »

debugnik wrote: post #169
mdasen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI Microsoft Teams was released in March 2017. .NET MAUI was released in May 2022. In 2021, Microsoft replaced Angular with React and moved away from Electron to WebView2 (using the OS' built-in renderer rather than a bundled Chromium). So even the rewrite was a year before MAUI (and they probably started the rewrite before 2021). Plus, part of the point of using React…

Teams is not older than MAUI because MAUI was mostly a rebrand of Xamarin Forms.

This. Xamarin is MAUI. Xamarin was founded in 2011, acquired by Microsoft in 2016 (a year after Flutter was created).

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

#233

Post by nu11ptr »

pshirshov wrote: post #224

Finally, finally, I can use something apart from Kotlin Multiplatform and Electron to build slow alien-looking applications with annoying animations and phone-styled UX for Linux (and, let me guess, there is no native Wayland backend). Of course the set of widgets is comprehensive - there are button and checkboxes, what else might we need. I'm wondering why all the demos of modern UI toolkits look and feel worse than…

You can (and could have for a while now) just use Avalonia natively. It supports Windows/Mac/Linux/WASM natively already. I think this work is primarily for those who already have MAUI apps and want to target Linux/WASM from an existing codebase.

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

#234

Post by thewebguyd »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #217
bonesss wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well summarized, and just as shocking today as it was every minute while it developed. Someone needs to remind those cats that they own the platform. Being able to sanely develop apps for and on that platform should be possible, and UI kinda-sorta matters for that. At a certain point with the MFC they had it dialled in, while pioneering asynchronous browser tech, with many best in class tools. Decades later with a cr…

Ballmer was not my favourite person to run MS, but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in. Early Nadella days too. Now? It's too easy to find no MS answers for almost everything, even triple-A gaming is not the windows anchor it's been since they ran that doom demo

> but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in

I did, it was great. Very apple-esque in a way. As long as you stayed in Microsoft's garden, you had a good time. Microsoft had, at the time, one of if not the most productive stack to build GUI desktop line of business apps. If your whole org was Microsoft from top to bottom, even better. AD auth in your desktop app in a couple of lines.

It was an expensive stack for sure, but I'd argue there's still nothing that has come close to it if you want to build an enterprise desktop app.

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

#236

Post by jermaustin1 »

judah wrote: 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…

> They are islands of richness within a web page.

1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet.

I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).

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

#237

Post by davey48016 »

pshirshov wrote: post #224

Finally, finally, I can use something apart from Kotlin Multiplatform and Electron to build slow alien-looking applications with annoying animations and phone-styled UX for Linux (and, let me guess, there is no native Wayland backend). Of course the set of widgets is comprehensive - there are button and checkboxes, what else might we need. I'm wondering why all the demos of modern UI toolkits look and feel worse than…

Avalonia does not have a Wayland backend now, but they say it's a priority: https://avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-wayland-support-to-aval...

I'm sure there's a better place to track the progress on that.

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

#238

Post by memsom »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #124
LeFantome wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MVC is not .NET of course. You are right that WinForms and MVC have been around forever. However, Microsoft has continuously told devs that they are the past. So, you would be forgiven for expecting them to go away. WinUI is the current official desktop paradigm and it is basically UWP from an API point of view. So the idea that UWP went away is not 100% accurate either. Microsoft does not really abandon their UI tec…

> MVC is not .NET of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET_MVC

MVC is a design pattern, ASP.NET MVC is a framework that used MVC as its go to pattern. But MVC is not in any way only ASP.NET MVC. There are plenty of other UI frameworks that use MVC and the Wikipedia article lists a lot of them for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93con...

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

#239

Post by memsom »

fuzzzerd wrote: post #119
password4321 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except WinForms, spectacular for Windows-only utility GUIs.

> spectacular Not exactly the word I'd use, since it really hasn't changed since VB4, but it's definitely reliable and stable.

WinForms came way after VB4 and it was a .Net only technology.

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

#240

Post by memsom »

glzone1 wrote: post #83
password4321 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except WinForms, spectacular for Windows-only utility GUIs.

No kidding - kind of wild that winforms is still kind of a gold standard experience today! I actually liked VB Forms - lots of easy rapid application development was possible.

Delphi was the best RAD tool though. It was native code, not a weird interpreted or jitted app. It could also build to a single exe file. VB struggled with an unwieldy engine for most of its life.
Post reply on HN