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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

What is the latest story of native UI's with .NET. There is always some half baked stuff going on and abandoned all the time.

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I haven't used it myself but I've had some colleagues recommend avalonia to me. They seem to really like it over MAUI.

Honestly I still love WPF (perhaps it's Stockholm syndrome). Obviously WPF only runs on windows desktop though.

Check out Avalonia’s XPF. Allows WPF to run on macOS and Linux with almost no changes in most cases.

https://avaloniaui.net/XPF

Thank you! I had no idea something like this existed!

Seconded.. IIRC, I Believe even since cross platform tools from Microsoft (Git Credential Manager) use it.

Same. Avalonia and Uno are the go to options for cross-platform UI on .NET these days.

The latest is MAUI, which seems to take a Dart/Flutter like approach.

As usual, the true test of whether something will stick is what apps/tools is Microsoft building with MAUI? If nothing, then good chance it is a yet another framework thrown at developers and abandoned five years later.

Does this take anything away from the rest of .NET?

Serious question.

Not expressly, I just wouldn't invest in it, since it will likely fall into a dead end, like Silverlight.

I'm not sure you answered my question.

Just don't use MAUI, in favor of anything else?

Why do you think it is similar to Dart/Flutter? MAUI is basically a dolled-up Xamarin, but catered to .net 6+ (which has the ios/android toolchains as first party TFMs so it makes it much nicer to organize projects in some ways).

It also comes with a slew of new bugs : )

It's worth to note that MAUI is not cross-platform (Microsoft say it is, but for me excluding Linux desktop and calling it cross-pratform is a lie/marketing bullshit)

That's not true. They support Android, iOS, and MacOS. I agree it's disappointing that they don't support Linux, but it is by definition cross-platform.

MAUI sucks big on desktop UI. Try Avalonia and it is 100 miles ahead of the game!

I see that Avalonia has a XAML previewer in VSCode. That's a big selling point for me so I'll give this a try. Thanks for mentioning it!

With all its quirks, flutter is still miles ahead of MAUI (just look at actual usage of maui, it's close to 0). And imo they both take a pretty different approach anyways.

MAUI uses native controls, wrapped in its own system. Considering that Flutter draws everything itself I'd say that's a pretty substantial difference. It also manifests in how close to native your app can look/feel or how easy it is to integrate features of the respective native controls.

Avalonia is perhaps closer to Flutter.

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