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.NET MAUI Release Candidate Announced

11 points by vanburen 5y ago

cmer 5y ago
It seems like these cross-platform solutions always sound good on paper but end up not being so great in real life. To anyone who’s used this already: is it better than say Xamarin?
- sdflhasjd 5y ago
  It's basically thr successor to Xamarin Forms - the same technology and concepts updated to .net 6 instead of Mono. It's still Xaml, still MVVM, still an abstraction on top of native components. It's only really different in they're supporting more platforms, updating to more modern .net (.net's IServiceProvider instead of Xamarin's DependencyService for DI), and there's some improvements to how the platform specific UI control adapters can be extended. As for whether it's better? The tooling is greatly improved and it eases some of the pain when writing "renderers". We were finding occasional bugs up until recently, and migrating is somewhat involved as you lose a lot of the old Xamarin package ecosystem.
- memsom 5y ago
  I’m looking at a Xamarin Forms app I develop commercially as I type this. It targets Android, but could have supported iOS and Windows from the same code base. Most of our non UI code is shared with WPF and Web apps. All of the UI uses Xamarin Forms and SkiaSharp to render custom UI elements. It will be ported to Maui this year and we will be making a Windows, iOS and possibly Mac version.
ammo1662 5y ago
As a developer who has experience with MFC, WinForm and WPF, I should say WPF is very well designed. And it is the first time I learn the concept of MVVM. Which helped a lot when I start to learn Angular. But for now, if I want to develop something with UI, I prefer to use ASP.NET Core with web application. Even though I hate Electron, I don't want to put any investment on Microsoft's UI framework. I already know too many dead Microsoft UI frameworks, I don't need another one.
- memsom 5y ago
  If you know WPF or UWP the differences in Xaml between Xamarin Forms and those frameworks is something you could learn very rapidly. If you use Xamarin Android you get native access also and, for example, can import Java jar files in to your .Net code, so you can utilise stuff intended at the native level in Android. Similar for the iOS integration. Xamarin Forms gives you the mvvm and databinding you know from WPF etc. Maui builds on this and improved the overall offering.
andrewf 5y ago
I'm a desktop Mac user and collaborate with folks on Mac/Windows/Linux; I sometimes want to whip up a quick local GUI to visualize some data (think collapsible treeviews, images with annotation from another file overlaid on top, etc). I've used ancient versions of Qt, Tk, web frameworks (kinda heavyweight and awkward)... I'm looking forward to giving the macOS version a spin next time the need arises!

11 points by vanburen 5y ago

cmer 5y ago

It seems like these cross-platform solutions always sound good on paper but end up not being so great in real life. To anyone who’s used this already: is it better than say Xamarin?

sdflhasjd 5y ago
It's basically thr successor to Xamarin Forms - the same technology and concepts updated to .net 6 instead of Mono. It's still Xaml, still MVVM, still an abstraction on top of native components. It's only really different in they're supporting more platforms, updating to more modern .net (.net's IServiceProvider instead of Xamarin's DependencyService for DI), and there's some improvements to how the platform specific UI control adapters can be extended. As for whether it's better? The tooling is greatly improved and it eases some of the pain when writing "renderers". We were finding occasional bugs up until recently, and migrating is somewhat involved as you lose a lot of the old Xamarin package ecosystem.
memsom 5y ago
I’m looking at a Xamarin Forms app I develop commercially as I type this. It targets Android, but could have supported iOS and Windows from the same code base. Most of our non UI code is shared with WPF and Web apps. All of the UI uses Xamarin Forms and SkiaSharp to render custom UI elements. It will be ported to Maui this year and we will be making a Windows, iOS and possibly Mac version.

ammo1662 5y ago

As a developer who has experience with MFC, WinForm and WPF, I should say WPF is very well designed. And it is the first time I learn the concept of MVVM. Which helped a lot when I start to learn Angular. But for now, if I want to develop something with UI, I prefer to use ASP.NET Core with web application. Even though I hate Electron, I don't want to put any investment on Microsoft's UI framework. I already know too many dead Microsoft UI frameworks, I don't need another one.

memsom 5y ago
If you know WPF or UWP the differences in Xaml between Xamarin Forms and those frameworks is something you could learn very rapidly. If you use Xamarin Android you get native access also and, for example, can import Java jar files in to your .Net code, so you can utilise stuff intended at the native level in Android. Similar for the iOS integration. Xamarin Forms gives you the mvvm and databinding you know from WPF etc. Maui builds on this and improved the overall offering.

andrewf 5y ago

I'm a desktop Mac user and collaborate with folks on Mac/Windows/Linux; I sometimes want to whip up a quick local GUI to visualize some data (think collapsible treeviews, images with annotation from another file overlaid on top, etc). I've used ancient versions of Qt, Tk, web frameworks (kinda heavyweight and awkward)... I'm looking forward to giving the macOS version a spin next time the need arises!