.NET MAUI for .NET 7 General Availability | Hacker News Reader

.NET MAUI for .NET 7 General Availability

devblogs.microsoft.com

24 pointsiruoy5 comments

This post says

Compatibility Notes

.NET MAUI 7 is compatible with:

    Android API 33
    Tizen 7.0
    Xcode 14.0.1 (iOS 16)
    WinUI 1.1.5

Searching for platforms shows an Oct. 2022 listing (plus a mention of Tizen supported by Samsung):

.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) apps can be written for the following platforms:

    Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher.
    iOS 11 or higher, using the latest release of Xcode.
    macOS 10.15 or higher, using Mac Catalyst.
    Windows 11 and Windows 10 version 1809 or higher, using Windows UI Library (WinUI) 3.

and some other version requirements for particular details.

This is a cross platform UI toolkit from Microsoft which doesn't support desktop Linux.

Indeed, which is kind of ridiculous. Additionally, it's build on Xamarin (the buggy cross platform framework) instead using the pretty usable WPF / XAML approach, they had to build something great. This also means you get bad performance through an additinal layer of rendering engine instead of direct rendering like in flutter (see https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/7212)

I, personally, prefer AvaloniaUI, a community driven project that uses the same rendering engine as flutter, which gains some pretty good traction atm. Although I doubt that C# will be anything more than niche for REAL UI development in the future. Even Microsoft does not use it for their apps (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32578178)... :-/

But that would require them to put significant engineering effort into WPF and risks upsetting their entrench WPF users, this way they can try and build a replacement on top of Xamarin having already done the hard work of building a cross platform foundation, and because it lives off to the side away from their nice stable WPF they don’t have to worry about it actually being good enough to satisfy anyone particularly important yet. So it’s in this fun low risk, low cost (to them in terms of developer support hours) playground… consequently it’s going to suck for ages until they get it “over the hump” and critical mass of adopters begins to demand better quality.

Unless like so many other Microsoft, and now basically all Google projects … their half assed efforts to test the waters with insufficient resources behind projects and lack of long term vision for the projects eventual success, they drive away anyone from actually relying on it and thus prevent it from ever really growing large enough they care, and it will eventually rot away until it’s cancelled. Or for Microsoft, just deprecated and left as is for anyone still using it until it stops working after several years of OS upgrades.

I think XAML is a dead horse, even if it once was a beautiful one, because XML is too bulky. The amount of effort you have to put into simple Controls is huge and even if it is a working spec, the productivity is just not appropriate, especially for styling.

The component/widget based approach in flutter feels like building Web components and in my opinion this is the right way for the future. Easy to learn and yet powerful.

If AvaloniaUI would provide a "functional" API with static usings that development would "feel" like Flutter or React and it would combine the best of both worlds. Old fashioned XAML pros would find a path to migrate and hype driven web / flutter pros would find it easy to switch... A bit of a CSS like parser and you would be done with a great product. A way to integrate JSX (or better C#X / blazorX) and I would be blown away.

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