.NET MAUI: .NET Multi-Platform App UI • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by ripley12 » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: 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…

Agreed, I really think Blazor is the way forward for .NET UI. It's bittersweet, but: the Windows and .NET teams have failed to deliver a compelling alternative to web UI, and I'm impressed with how well Blazor integrates web UI with .NET.

I think the killer feature is that it will work on any platform with a decent webview control (Windows will finally be joining that club soon when WebView2 ships in-box), including MAUI; so you can use the native hosting bits of MAUI and the web UI bits of Blazor, no XAML required. And then you can reuse that same UI on another platform or a web browser, trivially.

Hot reload for Blazor dropped in the recent .NET 6 preview 3 so this is a really good time to get started with it. It blows XAML Hot Reload out of the water because it can reload many C# changes in addition to HTML/CSS changes; XAML Hot Reload breaks down as soon as you need to change any C# code that touches your UI.

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

#42

Post by monkmartinez » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

rubyfan wrote: post #38

I don’t get why MSFT keep making the same thing over and over again. Who really cares about these abstraction layers. They produce junk apps by people who rarely care to keep up with them and go obsolete quickly.

It's great! Iteration in the space is greatly appreciated by me. Eventually we will get the cross platform UI layer that just works. We will not get there by just running Electron, React Native and others. I am super happy MSFT is having go after go at this!

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

#43

Post by xnyan » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

rubyfan wrote: post #38

I don’t get why MSFT keep making the same thing over and over again. Who really cares about these abstraction layers. They produce junk apps by people who rarely care to keep up with them and go obsolete quickly.

>I don’t get why MSFT keep making the same thing over and over again

I give them props for trying. There's nothing I would use (yet), but I do respect the grind and trying to move past failed attempts.

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

#44

Post by chgibb » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

vyrotek wrote: post #30

I'm an absolute huge fan of all things .NET but I'm honestly a little hesitant about MAUI for now. Just feels a little early and duct-tapped? I also had a poor experience with Xamarin years ago... Flutter is such a good experience for us right now. I'd love "Flutter but in C#" which I think is what they want to do with Xamarin.Forms. Is it ready?

Very early days and not quite "Flutter in C#" but support for C# is on the roadmap https://hydro-sdk.io/

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

#45

Post by chgibb » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #29

miohtama wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked Flutter? It is mobile-first, but does native desktop applications as well. Very battle tested and natively compiled fast code.

I prefer C#/F# over Dart, but Flutter is promising, and I continue to check in once and a while. I usually overcome PL preferences when the platform or toolkit is compelling. I remember Notch (of Minecraft fame) adopted Dart very early on, and I actually tried it out back then. Somebody had written a Lisp in Dart. I really like F#, and it seems to be sidelined all the time with .NET. There are more and more ways to w…

Very early days still but support for C# is on the roadmap https://hydro-sdk.io/

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

#46

Post by crazypython » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

The real "Write once, run anywhere" technology is the open web platform. Now with SIMD, WebGPU, Houdini, and more. Container queries built-in for responsive layouts. Run on touchscreens, virtual reality, desktop and more.

I expect HTML/CSS/JS performance optimization to be valued as a skill more. It is arguably great cross-platform technology (though lacking native widgets), but it has a lot of performance footguns, which we need people to be disciplined about.

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

#47

Post by jayd16 » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

ghuntley wrote: post #6

This is Xamarin forms with a new name.

They do have a whole section for differences. https://github.com/dotnet/maui#xamarinforms-vs-net-maui

If it turns out to be XamarinFroms done well, I can dig it.

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

#48

Post by powerlogic31 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 12:01 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #2

Any direct experiences using this? I've been looking for a good multiplatform UI for desktop that does Mac/Linux/Windows. Mobile is a nice side benefit. It would be nice to use C# again No, I'm not interested in Electron. Blegh.

Does Godot the game engine count? I've seen it used in a pixelorama and some map modeling program. Also it's cross platform with c# support and gdscript pretty easy to understand.

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

#49

Post by Scarbutt » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 12:03 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: 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…

Isn't asp.net the equivalent of javaee in the microsoft world?

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

#50

Post by timsneath » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #39

miohtama wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked Flutter? It is mobile-first, but does native desktop applications as well. Very battle tested and natively compiled fast code.

Java and C# are "battle tested." Flutter is an experimental Google project.

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.

"Experimental" feels like an odd word choice, if you're truly trying to offer useful information.

[Disclosure: I work on the Flutter team.]