Fool me once shame on you, fool
me twice shame on me. Windows phone/Xamarin, Microsoft really doesn’t understand what mobile developers want. What’s the point in investing to learn something when it will be in the hospice next year.
- They only work for the newest Windows Build
- There are no compatibility packs to target older Windows Versions (7 or 8) or even older Windows 10 Builds (not even the Windows 10 LTSC)
- They are more proof-of-concepts and feel unfinished. After the release, they only get minor updates
- All the minor updates need the newest Windows Build again
- Your customers ask you if you are crazy, because your software doesn't run on a 5 year old PC, that doesn't auto upgrade to the newest Windows version anymore
Avalonia: https://avaloniaui.net/
Uno Platform: https://platform.uno/
Edit: Nevermind, found one myself:
An internal binary leaked a while ago, someone confirmed the WebView2 aspect: https://twitter.com/teroalhonen/status/1346196838840463360
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 can build everything with it, but if you do something else than the showcase app, you are going to have a difficult time.
Xamarin is for sure not going to die soon.
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.
You don't know what you're talking about clearly.
Doing consulting I've done plenty of projects in React Native and played with Flutter a bit but Xamarin really is a great framework.
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.
Site note: 5 eliminates "framework" and "core"; 5 is technically a descendent of the core family (also skipping 4.x versioning, as it overlaps with framework 4.x), but satisfies all the requirements of apps that use framework 4.x. Ergo, "framework" is available on non-Windows targets and you no longer need to choose.
Xamarin also produced an entire UI framework. WinUI 3 (/w MAUI for non-Windows) is the intended upgrade path of Xamarin Forms, while the rest of Xamarin UI that isn't part of Forms lives on either in WinUI 3 or has designated replacements. In many cases, the upgrade is merely changing your `using` lines.
Side note: Uno has been using non-Forms Xamarin UI like this for years, substituting Xamarin's functionality when you're not on Windows.
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.