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Comment by Vitamin_Sushi | Hacker News Reader

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Vitamin_Sushi

Nope, not falling for this again microsoft. Once you actually start dogfooding your own GUI frameworks, then I'll bite.

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Maui is Open Source, MIT License

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

It isn't about whether it is open source or not. It's about what will be their stance on GUIs in a year or two and whether the projects of today are abandonded or not. Windows Forms, Silverlight, WPF, UWP, WinUI, Blazor, and then Xamarin Forms and MAUI, and then the third party ones like Avalonia and Uno Platform.

It's insane because actually all anyone wants is Windows Forms and WPF. If Microsoft made a cross-platform version of Windows Forms and WPF, they would be the cross-platform frameworks, at least for desktop.

If you want cross-platform WPF, there is Avalonia. For many normal-ish applications you basically change a few namespaces and that should be bulk of the work to migrate.

I do wonder sometimes whether MS should just pick it up as a default-endorsed desktop UI toolkit for .NET, but I guess rivalries, internal turf wars and other priorities make that difficult.

I love the fact that .NET and friends are open source, but my issue isn't with the licensing, it's with m$ funneling tons of resources on projects that (most likely) will end up being a dead end.

I'd also love if maui actually takes off since it does seem pretty neat, but until microsoft uses it for teams or any other of their clients, I'll pass.

They also aren't even targeting linux or web browsers, which doesn't really make this more compelling than Flutter.

Tons of ressources ? MAUI is clearly underfunded!

.NET is used all over the place in Microsoft, including many Microsoft Teams services being migrated to .NET. Teams is listed on Microsoft’s .NET customers page.

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/customers

Teams was originally written before this particular release existed.

The commenter was referring to Microsoft's GUI frameworks on offer in .NET and not .NET in general. Of course .NET is used everywhere at Microsoft. C# is one of the most popular languages in the world.

They were talking about Microsoft constantly re-inventing GUI frameworks and then abandoning them. For example, you bring up Teams, but Teams is actually an Electron app, which gets to the point of the commenter.

Putting it up on Github won't change the likely outcome that the project will be abandondend for the next shiny thing in 2 or 3 years.

I think they may be referring to WPF, it promised so much, and it was great - then it was just left to die, and Microsoft moved on to MAUI

Actually they moved onto UWP, then they moved onto WinUI 3. Now all this talk about MAUI but they have done zero dogfooding of it. People are sceptical of WinUI 3 but at least they used it in Windows 11.

Microsoft employee here. There is a lot of momentum behind MAUI so I am optimistic.

There's like... zero momentum behind MAUI. The wider industry has learned their lesson and nobody in their right mind would ever use MAUI for a new GUI project unless Microsoft converts 80% of their applications to it.

The only decent GUI framework for Windows is Electron, which is based on Chromium.

Microsoft's new GUI applications use Electron: VS Code, Azure Data Studio, etc...

In other words: Google makes the best Microsoft Windows GUI framework, as endorsed by Microsoft's own developers.

>The only decent GUI framework for Windows is Electron, which is based on Chromium.

Why not avalonia?

Ask that to Microsoft.

> The only decent GUI framework for Windows is Electron

What a peculiar way of spelling “WinForms”

Well, Microsoft ditched Electron for their new version of Teams.

The new framework for Teams is just an Edge-flavored version of Electron, not MAUI.

You're talking about momentum within Microsoft, I assume? There's no detectable momentum in the community at large. The ball hasn't even begun to roll. I have not heard or seen anyone using MAUI for anything serious so far. I've been writing Windows applications for 25 years at this point and am certainly not considering MAUI any time soon. They only just added keyboard accelerators--this is obviously not serious yet. To this day we are still writing Windows Forms applications. I'd consider embedding Blazor before I'd consider MAUI.

Having lived through a lot of Microsoft GUI frameworks, I would say that I won't be fooled this easily. Not with another half-assed unfinished library. I'll be interested once it qualifies as whole-assed and not a moment sooner.

Useful to know. So if I'm starting to build a new Windows app, what is Microsoft's recommendation?

Should I use MAUI? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne...) Or WPF? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/overvie...) Or WinForms? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/ov...) Or WinUI 2? Or WinUI 3? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/#compar...) Or React Native for Windows? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/ja...) Or Blazor? (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...) Or Win32? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/desktop-prog...) Or even Xamarin? (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/xamarin/)

I feel like I might have missed a few...

And how confident are you that my choice isn't going to be deprecated in a couple of years? I'm not certain that "momentum" is worth much from a company who changes UI frameworks as often as some people change underwear...

Rookie mistake. The answer is obviously Silverlight.

No, win32 rules or maybe WTL or MFC or even Visual J++.

I wonder why this is. Is it because management is asleep at the wheel? Is it because teams competes with each other without direction from the top? Is it because heavy rotation of leadership who doesnt know better?

Any insiders?

https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2011.06.27_o...

Oh? I work for one of the largest jobs site in Asia. Maui has only one entry for the year 2023. Not sure what momentum are you talking about.

Use Outlook 365 and Teams School and Work to prove MAUI, then we’ll take it more seriously.

> There is a lot of momentum behind MAUI

Source?

I'm not entirely sure. SkiaSharp is the driver behind all the 2D graphics, isn't it? But the SkiaSharp repo is effectively unmaintained except maybe to support critical things for MAUI.

SkiaSharp has some MAUI integration, but AFAIK it's not used to render things. At least not when I last looked. On most (all?) platforms native drawing methods are used (which fits well into how MAUI works on each platform, admittedly). This comes with the drawback that performance varies wildly across platforms, however. (NB: I've last looked deeply into MAUI about a year ago, so things may have changed.)

Which Microsoft Product is using MAUI ? Any MS Windows App being built in MAUI ?

Word, Excel, Outlook.

Just kidding, it's probably some intern's dashboard that monitors their Clippy staging environments.

keep drinking that kool-aid.

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