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.NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser

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

#61

Post by brokencode »

latentsea wrote: post #42
mattfrommars wrote: post #25

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.

As wrong as it feels to have to use Electron for a desktop app, it really is the safest approach for most applications.

Qt also seems to be a good option, though there are licensing considerations for commercial applications.

I’m excited for various upcoming Rust options as well, but right now Electron is the battle tested option.

I am curious though about Avalonia. I’ve heard good things, but it’s definitely a smaller player compared to Electron. I’d most likely choose it over Microsoft’s first party frameworks.

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

#62

Post by weq »

Kyrio wrote: post #45
mattfrommars wrote: post #25

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 solut…

Ive been building these apps (cross platform web based ui, C# backend) for years, and yes its finally good to see MS catch up and validate the architecture ive pushed since Xamarin. I wrote once wrote an electron version of this archand thought wtf are people doing? Things can be so much easier when you use a platform that knows how to multi-thread. At stages i had to build adapters/upstream patches for Chromeiunium directly onto Mac and Linux, and its was a major pain having to debug C calls.

Ive been using the same framework now for 10+yrs on apps in the stores, i wrote a small layer infront of the webviews and can swap out webkit, chrome, edge on demand. You really dont need much, just a constand way to boostrap logic and UI. 90% of code is shared across all platforms, there are def differences in WebView engines that you sometimes come across but those parts just get swapped out with browser specific JS. Ive found bugs and worked with browser teams at all vendors doing this and to see how simple this is with Dotnet these days compared to when i started is refreshing. Its easily the most stable cross-platform framework around, if you are stuck using something like flutter i pitty you, its just eletron with another skin. I can swap out and integrate directly with OS libs when i need to do stuff that the dotnet team hasnt gotten around to yet without re-writing. This has mean i really havnt used MAUI at all, but if i need to or could take advantage of it i can mix it on an Ui element by element basis. I prefer webUIs though, i have the chose to handle anything with either JS, WASM, or a combination. I can use traditional JS frameworks or traditional Native UI frameworks.

If i had started this process later, avalonia seemed to have the closest thing i required. It was just a bit a more complex /based on WinUI (which i dont really enjoy) but it supported all platforms and gave lower level api access. MS were smart, that canabalanised all these community effort and brought them into the fold. Every dotnet webview impl was a successfull community driven project before. They didnt write anything themselves from scratch.

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

#63

Post by okanat »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #34
mattfrommars wrote: post #25

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.

That has been a problem since forever. Microsoft themselves rarely used the tools they gave to developers. SourceSafe, MFC, WPF and the .NET frameworks that followed were only for 3rd party devs. And when they used these tools, the software usually got worse. One example was Visual Studio. 2008 was really nice with great customization and good performance. Then they wrote 2010 with MFC and it was slow and lost tons o…

You are mixing your UI frameworks and versions. VS 2010 is written in WPF. WPF is / was Windows Vista's and 7's UX. Old Control Panel in Win 10/11 still is WPF. All the wizards like ClearType wizard is WPF. MFC is much older (1992).

Unfortunately Microsoft likes to jump into bandwagons and many engineers at the company seem to like to reinvent stuff rather than adopt. WPF, WinUI2 and WinUI3 all share the same Xaml based structure. So they could have adopted WPF.

It is not that Microsoft doesn't develop advanced UIs with their frameworks. WPF is still well-used by Windows and other Microsoft utilities like Windows Terminal. They are just stupidly abandoning their built up bases for silly industry fads.

They jumped into tablet / touchscreen / hybrid-mobile-desktop bandwagon in late-2010s and tried to force WinUI as an UWP-only feature. It resulted in low adoption. They didn't adopt WPF to have same theming.

When WinUI2 failed, they tried to make modern C++ a reality and tried to remove UWP restrictions which is a good decision. However they diverted quite a bit resources into AI slop generation now and WinUI3 just languishes.

Same for MAUI. They tried to get into multi-platform, multi-device framework as a way to generate leads into Microsoft ecosystem.

They try to use various frameworks and UI stuff to get people hooked into the ecosystem and find ways to upgrade them into Azure and M365 customers. It is meaningless and tiring. All of those could be only WPF.

It is like Google and its many Bazel-like build systems (but not full Bazel) for each of Chrome, Fuschia and Android.

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

#64

Post by weq »

It seems like alot of people in this thread dont undestand the dotnet stack. MAUI, Native UIs, and WASM are all interchangable. Your cross platform app could literly be built out of everyone of of these components at once. MAUI is not required for use-cases generally when you have a webUI, its really targetting at the simple UI, write-once, run anywhere crowd. Once you outgrow it, you can move to native integrations using dotnet linux/mac/windows. Or you can just integrate with webviews, and have C# backend's or WASM backends. The combination is limitless.

Xamarin turned into dotnet, Xamarin.forms turned into turned into Maui. Name another large tech company that has embraced community projects like this and pushed provided enterprise support for community driven stuff over the same period.

I was writing cross-platform apps before Flutter, angular, or whatever other language you choose for 11yrs now. Find another framework thats done this before the scare tactics of "MS will abandon this" rhetroic. dotnet is the premier cross-platform enterprise ready framework full stop. No other framwork has the backwards compatiblty while maintaining paritity with the latest OS APIs. No other framework can serve millions of pages per/sec while supporting pixel perfect UIs and code-reuse. They have invested so much money in building automation that means as soon as the OS releases an API, your getting access to it. In real world terms, this is what counts if you want to build cross-platform stuff that your clients cant tell isn't native.

I run the same code from 2014, today, in apps in all the stores. Over the years all i have had to change is various namespaces to take advantage of the latest enhancements. Code that ran on dotnet4, silverlight, xamarin, still runs today on dotnet10. I share 90% of code across all platforms yet clients cant tell they are not native apps. Thats what i call return on investment.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

weq wrote: post #62
Kyrio wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solut…

Ive been building these apps (cross platform web based ui, C# backend) for years, and yes its finally good to see MS catch up and validate the architecture ive pushed since Xamarin. I wrote once wrote an electron version of this archand thought wtf are people doing? Things can be so much easier when you use a platform that knows how to multi-thread. At stages i had to build adapters/upstream patches for Chromeiunium…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by LelouBil »

keyle wrote: post #16
labrador wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft acts when it feels competitive pressure. I think Google's Flutter has been validated so Microsoft feels the need to respond.

Dart is a wonderful language though. I'm not switching back to using .NET anytime soon.

What would be to point of switching from Kotlin + Composel (Multiplatform) to Dart + Flutter ?

Currently my favourite way to build applications (desktop or mobile) is Kotlin and Compose.

I never used Dart, how would you compare it to Kotlin ?

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

#67

Post by bigstrat2003 »

brokencode wrote: post #61
latentsea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As wrong as it feels to have to use Electron for a desktop app, it really is the safest approach for most applications. Qt also seems to be a good option, though there are licensing considerations for commercial applications. I’m excited for various upcoming Rust options as well, but right now Electron is the battle tested option. I am curious though about Avalonia. I’ve heard good things, but it’s definitely a small…

> it really is the safest approach for most applications.

It's also the option which gives your users by far the worst experience. Not worth it at all, imo.

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

#68

Post by georgemcbay »

mattfrommars wrote: post #25

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.

MAUI was horrible when I tried using it about a year ago, tons of bugs, pretty iffy comms/support from the MAUI team as to timelines when things might get fixed, etc.

Eventually dumped it and moved to Kotlin Compose/Multiplatform, which is just so much better at achieving a similar goal (though, obviously, without being part of the .NET ecosystem).

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

#69

Post by brokencode »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #67
brokencode wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As wrong as it feels to have to use Electron for a desktop app, it really is the safest approach for most applications. Qt also seems to be a good option, though there are licensing considerations for commercial applications. I’m excited for various upcoming Rust options as well, but right now Electron is the battle tested option. I am curious though about Avalonia. I’ve heard good things, but it’s definitely a small…

> it really is the safest approach for most applications. It's also the option which gives your users by far the worst experience. Not worth it at all, imo.

Not really. The downsides are mostly overblown.

Plenty of category leading applications like Discord, VSCode, Slack, Figma, etc. use it quite successfully.

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

#70

Post by charcircuit »

a2128 wrote: post #20
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…

Not using the standard web stuff usually means it's also an accessibility nightmare, tried using a screen reader on the demo and it doesn't work at all unfortunately

What screen reader? Over the last few years AI's ability to understand images has improved a lot.
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