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.NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI

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

#251

Post by publicola1990 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #240
publicola1990 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the story with Xamarin now? Does it have a present/future?

Xamarin is merging into .NET with .NET 6. MAUI is the new name/brand of what used to be Xamarin.Forms the cross-platform UI toolkit. The rest of Xamarin, the "binding glue" to build .NET applications for Android and iOS is now just "profiles"/"targets" of .NET 6 itself: net6.0-android and net6.0-ios.

That sounds a like a good thing, but really I'm not hearing any buzz about it here or in other tech news sources.

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

#252

Post by miffy900 »

Yuioup wrote: post #213
andix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two sides of Xamarin. It builds native apps and you can use their native UI systems. So you can build a native Android UI and a native iOS UI next to each other. This will give you perfectly native apps with the ability to share as much code as possible. The other side is Xamarin.Forms and its designated successor MAUI. Here you have the typical Microsoft UI problem. It is quite an unfinished framework. You…

Xamarin.Forms isn't just unfinished. It's total garbage. Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse. Plus building and cross-compiling between Windows and Mac is hacky and painfully slow. I wish Microsoft would get rid of Xamarin. Every Visual Studio update has a bugfix for it, usually relating to iOS.

> Plus you can't share UI code between Android and iOS. You still need to build the UI's natively with no code reuse.

Utterly false - Xamarin Forms is totally cross-platform UI; you're probably mistaking it for Xamarin Native, which is used as a target renderer for each platform. Look at this sample project: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master...

The .iOS and .Android project folders target each platform respectively, with a single project shared between them that defines UI that is rendered onto each platform. You claim to have experience with using it, but obviously haven't done anything even as simple as a HelloWorld.

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

#253

Post by tracker1 »

mycall wrote: post #127
tracker1 wrote: post #77

I would say I'm hopeful for this to bear fruit. MS is in a much different position today than in the past. That said, my opinion still generally stands, When I see 3 versions from MS with cross platform support, at that point I'll consider it. For me, without a supported Linux target, it's pretty much a no-go. Having a single UI platform that gets you most of the way there is really nice. Part of why I actually like…

> When I see 3 versions from MS with cross platform support, at that point I'll consider it .NET Core 2.x (2019), .NET Core 3.x, .NET 5, .NET 6 (Sept 2021) Will you consider then?

I already consider .Net itself suitable for cross platform use. MAUI had no supported Linux target and no indication that it will be community adopted/done.

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

#254

Post by WorldMaker »

publicola1990 wrote: post #251
WorldMaker wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xamarin is merging into .NET with .NET 6. MAUI is the new name/brand of what used to be Xamarin.Forms the cross-platform UI toolkit. The rest of Xamarin, the "binding glue" to build .NET applications for Android and iOS is now just "profiles"/"targets" of .NET 6 itself: net6.0-android and net6.0-ios.

That sounds a like a good thing, but really I'm not hearing any buzz about it here or in other tech news sources.

Obviously I don't know what you are reading, but I've seen a lot of buzz about MAUI (including this article we are commenting on) since last BUILD when it was announced. Some of my "enterprise" dark matter feeds have been extremely excited at the idea that Xamarin.Forms is moving into System.* namespaces in .NET and what that means for certain types of very conservative enterprise adoption (it no longer looks like a 3rd party option with a weird brand; it's "real" .NET top to bottom).

The other part isn't getting as much buzz ("Xamarin is now just a 'compiler feature' of .NET 6+"), in part because it does seem somewhat "anti-news", it's not a new brand like MAUI or new buzzwords, it's just feature check boxes in a list. That said, you can tell it was a lot of hard work technically and I know a bunch of developers that are excited that there's just one unified tool stack now (you can use the CLI `dotnet` for everything that Xamarin used to do; Visual Studio has some updates to make everything feel even more seamless than it used to, including a lot more improvements to single project multi-targeting instead of needing to create a project per target OS/hardware). That buzz is out there on social media, at least, if it isn't making huge splashes in news sources.

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

#255

Post by manigandham »

flukus wrote: post #248
manigandham wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than Silverlight, the rest are still available today. Microsoft is unmatched in backwards compatibility. How are you being forced to rewrite your software?

.net core broke compatibility with many more, c#/.net is now decoupled from MS legendary backwards compatibility. Then you've got things like hiring concerns, $nextJob will want people with $nextTech on their resume, it doesn't matter if something is still technically supported because hiring people willing to work on dead platforms is a tough ask, moreso when the tech is a couple of generations old. This churn isn't…

Again, you do not need to rewrite anything if you don't want to upgrade to .netcore/5.0 because .NET Framework is still supported and has a long lifecycle tied to Windows itself. You can even write C# 1.0 code and it will still compile and run today without any issue.

Do you expect software to stand still for decades? Please show which other language stack comes anywhere close to this kind of stability because several of them (go, nodejs, rust) didn't even exist when .NET was first released and running critical systems in major companies.

You can still find COBOL and Fortran jobs if you want to avoid anything new, no need to complain about the industry moving on.

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

#256

Post by memsom »

dnndev wrote: post #217
oaiey wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not just go all in and back react native? looks like they use it extensively already https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/microsoft-goes-all...

As a developer who is also a Xamarin Forms user I can say - I get really nice performance out of Xamarin Forms these days. I'm not interested in React Native because it doesn't give me anything I can't do pretty quickly. This is also why I'm not interested in Kotlin and the Android SDK. I've been more or less exclusively developing Android Apps using Xamarin Forms for the last 18 months and Maui is way more exciting than anything else I see from other frameworks.

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

#258

Post by tracker1 »

flukus wrote: post #102
cutler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it realistic to expect MS to support a language they purposely built a replacement for 18 years ago? What's stopped you "upgrading" to C# in 18 years?

When they go out of their way to say VB is a first class component and repeatadly say over many years that c# is not a replacement for VB then yes, I do think it's realistic to expect them to support it. That said, despite what MS has said the writing has been on the wall for VB.net since day one and it was only ever a transitional path for VB classic. The companies that never made the transition are the ones you gen…

I know someone I used to work with who was a VB .Net MVP for a number of years, and even a decade ago, his biggest complaint was lack of support/examples inside and from MS.

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

#259

Post by memsom »

ripley12 wrote: post #89
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer VB. I have a degree in writing C#, I just find VB vastly preferable to work in. I hesitate to believe Python would exist in the way it does today if Microsoft hadn't treated VB so badly. It's only now being replaced as the default to teach in schools because of its simplicity and readability.

This is very foreign to me, and I'm not a VB hater. I spent a long time working in a codebase that was half C# and half VB.NET, and after a couple years I could switch between the two without thinking. VB has slightly more verbose syntax but that's about it, they're pretty interchangeable. I don't hate `Dim foo As Boolean = True` but I wouldn't say it's more simple and readable than `bool foo = true;`.

I did this a number of times. I started working on a VB.Net source base around 2007 and started to introduce C# as soon as I could, then next job in 2013 was also a WinForms app that embedded some WPF and used mainly VB.Net and some C#. I have to say, C# feels a lot more productive for me. I can switch between C# and VB.Net easily, but some of the stuff VB.Net does makes no sense.

The 2007 project was a mess when I inherited it - the contractors who wrote it were based in India, and the code looked like a VB6 project. They had not turned on option explicit or option strict. They did not understand how events or event handlers worked - they added handles clauses to methods then assigned a variable with the current instance to make the events happen. It was bizarre. They also did a lot of horribly hacky things because all the variables were basically being treated as variant. There was even a bit of code where they had a select case statement where a Boolean variable was being used as a case... and I mean it was doing a select case on and integer, and one of the cases was a Boolean variable. So it depended on what that was set to as to what the case did. I turned on option strict and explicit, took a deep breath, and fixed the hundreds of errors. It was BRUTAL! I'm not saying this is something that is an issue with VB, that was down to the programmers not being trained properly and making some very bad decisions. But in C# it would have been very hard to make the same mistakes.

By the time I left the 2013 job in 2018, I had divorced myself from almost all of the VB.Net code and I swore I would never touch VB again. So far, so good.

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