4 ms·

Xamarin Forms was not good tech.... :-)

Mertax 6y ago
Hopefully a chance for them to take what they learned through years of experience and cut away from the cruft/technical debt that built up with Xamarin.Forms. I think there is potential for redemption here -- although I do worry the native widget binding approach still comes with a lot of friction that adds unavoidable complexity. However, Maui's new "handler" pattern for native widgets seems like it could be adapted to support Skia/manually rendered widgets if someone wanted to invest in that non-trivial effort. From my experience the native widget binding is both the strength and the weakness of the approach. You get to take advantage of battle tested native controls that are fully featured. But if the platforms don't have enough similarity between them to create a cohesive interface then you're battling multiple platforms trying to take advantage of the native features layered in another opinionated model that sometimes can be detrimental to the native performance you're hoping to leverage.
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  I'd love if this could be a step forward but from my fly-on-the-wall perspective following the github, I'm not optimistic that the team has internalized what exactly this new thing should be, and how it should differ from Xamarin. I'm hopeful though.
datavirtue 6y ago
That's why it exploded in popularity then? Literally exploded and was releasing on a rapid cadence to a fervorous developer base. The current non-MAUI Xamarin is very refined and complete from a performance and feature perspective. It is literally the only viable serious cross-platform and mobile development platform.
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  Its important to distinguish between Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Native (which Forms is built on top of). Xamarin.Native is quite nice and is the best abstraction available today (in my opinion). Xamarin.Forms is indeed not great. It is an OK solution for a subset of problems, but even for those I'm left wondering if the pain is worth it rather than rolling my own native frontends in Xamarin.Native.
  - wsc981 6y ago
    Xamarin.Forms might not be great if you want to create a beautiful app that performs very smoothly, but it’s pretty sweet for making multiplatform business apps for use in-house (as in: not sold on app stores) imo.
    - JamesSwift 6y ago
      Right, internal apps are the sort of thing I think fall in the 'subset of problems' its good for, but as soon as you have a design guide to adhere to (i.e. you aren't just shipping the out-of-the-box configurations) its buggy and painful.
nbevans 6y ago
Huh? Xamarin Forms is huge in line of business applications. Huge.

Hopefully a chance for them to take what they learned through years of experience and cut away from the cruft/technical debt that built up with Xamarin.Forms. I think there is potential for redemption here -- although I do worry the native widget binding approach still comes with a lot of friction that adds unavoidable complexity. However, Maui's new "handler" pattern for native widgets seems like it could be adapted to support Skia/manually rendered widgets if someone wanted to invest in that non-trivial effort. From my experience the native widget binding is both the strength and the weakness of the approach. You get to take advantage of battle tested native controls that are fully featured. But if the platforms don't have enough similarity between them to create a cohesive interface then you're battling multiple platforms trying to take advantage of the native features layered in another opinionated model that sometimes can be detrimental to the native performance you're hoping to leverage.

JamesSwift 6y ago
I'd love if this could be a step forward but from my fly-on-the-wall perspective following the github, I'm not optimistic that the team has internalized what exactly this new thing should be, and how it should differ from Xamarin. I'm hopeful though.

datavirtue 6y ago

That's why it exploded in popularity then? Literally exploded and was releasing on a rapid cadence to a fervorous developer base. The current non-MAUI Xamarin is very refined and complete from a performance and feature perspective. It is literally the only viable serious cross-platform and mobile development platform.

JamesSwift 6y ago
Its important to distinguish between Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Native (which Forms is built on top of). Xamarin.Native is quite nice and is the best abstraction available today (in my opinion). Xamarin.Forms is indeed not great. It is an OK solution for a subset of problems, but even for those I'm left wondering if the pain is worth it rather than rolling my own native frontends in Xamarin.Native.
- wsc981 6y ago
  Xamarin.Forms might not be great if you want to create a beautiful app that performs very smoothly, but it’s pretty sweet for making multiplatform business apps for use in-house (as in: not sold on app stores) imo.
  - JamesSwift 6y ago
    Right, internal apps are the sort of thing I think fall in the 'subset of problems' its good for, but as soon as you have a design guide to adhere to (i.e. you aren't just shipping the out-of-the-box configurations) its buggy and painful.

nbevans 6y ago

Huh? Xamarin Forms is huge in line of business applications. Huge.