11 ms·

Developers are not happy with .NET MAUI, but nobody in the team cares about it

151 points by yell0wsnow 3y ago

diedead 3y ago
We're working on a MAUI app at work right now. Although I believe the MAUI developers are doing the best they can with a shitty situation (just not enough developers or QA staff for such a complex project), I can say my experience with MAUI has been horrible. I'm curious as to whether any React Native devs here have had any similar issues? I wonder if all this crap is just what happens when you're trying to do a cross-platform (native) UI framework. It seems that there are people who love React Native (for example Theo Browne) [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_FcxGCCnUs&t=19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_FcxGCCnUs&t=19
yell0wsnow 3y ago
I was browsing the dotnet/maui repo and the vibes over there are not great. decided to give the framework a quick spin myself and for god sake, this thing is in terrible shape. I built a quick holy grail layout with basic content and it looks completely different on all platforms. basic controls are not working and collections are laggy. seems that nobody in the team really uses this thing in production or interacts with the community more of the same https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/17917 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/17917 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/15203 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/15203
superchroma 3y ago
Yeah, it's over. Avalonia has blossomed into a functional framework in the time it's taken for MAUI to get to wherever here is. It's basically a drop-in replacement for WPF in terms of controls, to a degree that honestly surprised me. The default styling isn't that sexy, but you can change it, just like WPF, so I'd say it's mission complete as far as ordinary apps are concerned! I think Microsoft has given up on facilitating application development beyond VS and C#.
ecmascript 3y ago
The problem with using Microsofts stuff is that is half baked all the time and it's hard to fix. I have made an Xamarin Forms app and it was hard to do things that were not basic. Just use the web platform unless you really, really need to do something specific which cannot be done as a web app.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Three decades of experience talking here: If you don't see a vendor like Microsoft using a GUI framework for at least 50% of their new applications, then you've made a terrible mistake in adopting it yourself. Microsoft uses Google's framework for their own applications: Electron. Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft, a nearly 3 trillion dollar company, uses the framework of a competitor for their own desktop applications. Teams: Electron. Visual Studio Code: Electron. Azure Data Studio: Electron. Now, let's make a similar list for Microsoft MAUI apps! Umm... err... hmm...
- ecmascript 3y ago
  Electron is owned by Github which is owned by Microsoft tho. They also own npm and typescript. So Microsoft themselves has been moving away from native apps a long time so your main point is still valid.
- MyFirstSass 3y ago
  This is bizarre to me. What applications are they actually using the framework for? Is it because it's easier to make cross platform? Reminds a bit of when i used Angular back in the day and it seemed Google of all people didn't use it for any of their many web services.
  - hu3 3y ago
    Angular is prime example. From my consulting experience, Angular (Google tech), is most used today along with .NET backends (Microsoft tech). I don't think I ever saw a client using Angular + Go, for example.
    - ecshafer 3y ago
      Ive seen angular with c#, java, python and node backends. Angular though is mostly popular with big enterprise non tech companies, more industry differences than tech differences.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    Microsoft hasn't really dogfooded their own external facing GUI frameworks in forever. It's not a great look, but to some degree it also made sense. These frameworks (especially the dumpster fire ones) are .NET/C# (usually with XAML) frameworks, designed (it feels like) primarily to build line of business internal applications, with cross-platformness tacked on in more recent years. The grand-daddy of all of these would be WPF (all the way back in 2006). Basically Microsoft's flagship non-developer apps (ie Office Suite) is its own little kingdom. They never bought into any of the developer facing C# frameworks that MS created (makes sense I guess?... Office isn't a C# code base). Office basically developed its own visual language and internal framework. Visual Studio itself actually got some WPF back in the day (though I understood the code base to be kind of what you expect of something of its heritage). I imagine it still has WPF to this day. Their newer apps - especially the ones that are actually trying to be cross platform (like Teams, VSCode and friends). Well, Teams has the excuse that they need a web version anyways, so Electron really does make sense (see Discord and Slack). VSCode... the first version of VSCode came out in 2015 (omg..... it actually released a few months before Windows 10). MS had no in-house cross platform solution at that time. At that time, they did have a partnership with Xamarin (Xamarin would later be acquisition). .NET MAUI is the evolution of Xamarin. But Xamarin I always understood to be a bit of a dumpster fire. I was evaluating our choices for a small windows desktop app back in ~2015-2016. Xamarin did not seem appealing. After a misfire with UWP (another MS footgun I think), we just did WPF (cross-platform not required). Honestly, I wouldn't expect anything that could even remotely be described as an "IDE" to NOT be based on the VSCode code base now. MS has something -very- good going for it there. And I guess this is kind of one of the challenges. The part of MS that builds apps, is not really related to the part of the MS that builds GUI frameworks for external developers. And the part of the MS that builds apps does not really want their success to be tied to this dumpster fire.
nor0x 3y ago
Also the foundation for MAUI, the native bindings for .NET are incomplete and broken. Back in the Xamarin days the promise was that "everything you can do natively you can do in .NET" - this hasn't been true for a long time. Most of the new frameworks, especially on the iOS side don't have a binding and Microsoft doesn't have a story for Swift based libraries at all
rafaelmn 3y ago
few months ago I tried to wrap up a MAUI PoC app from a more junior coworker, who failed to deliver anything working after weeks of trying. Then I spent two weeks on trivial shit and stuff you expect to work by default (pull to refresh, video streaming, video in list view etc.) After two weeks of stress, failure and dozen of known issues on GitHub with tons of frustrated developers [1], I rewrote the whole poc in flutter in 3 days. Keep in mind this was a simple app with two screens and sign in/sign up - the only thing mildly technicall was a list view with videos (video feed). Literally nothing in MAUI worked as advertised and their showoff apps are ridiculous. The build process takes forever and breaks randomly, iteration is slow and debugging breaks all the time. This is the exact same experience I've had with Xamarin 5-6 years ago. Any imaginary gain you think you'll have by being able to share code between client and server will be offset many times by having a sane/working dev environment like flutter (working framework, fast iteration) and the language isn't that far off from c#. [1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8926#issuecomment-1563097522 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8926#issuecomment-1563...
baz00 3y ago
> "It seems to me that this is the end for Microsoft's mobile team. They do not fix own bugs, they do not respond to the tickets, the even do not review PRs made a year ago" That's always been the case with all of their frameworks. Even if the entire userbase is spitting fire the default position is to double down on whatever stupid thing they're doing or ignoring it. Only time I ever got anything fixed was when I was working for an MS partner and we threatened to become an Oracle partner. Then again the OSS community is only slightly better and Apple is definitely worse!
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Since we're talking about GUI frameworks, I wonder how Qt fares in terms of bugs and fixing them.
  - baz00 3y ago
    Well Qt on macOS is a shit show. I pretty much had to move half my stuff off Mac because two Qt based programs I work on regularly keep breaking every time they update macOS.
agilob 3y ago
What? A multibilion corporation does not listen to user feedback on GitHub? That's so crazy and unusual. Take some lessons from Google here, when users complained on quality of software and bugs in it, Google just archived OSS repos and moved development to private repo. Opensource and issues on repos are close to worthless (sometimes somebody else in comments will find a solution or work on a fork, but that's it), might as well be not available at all.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  The Chrome team must be an exception then, my bug reports there usually get prompt feedback, and when those were actual problems they also get fixed in time (sometimes it takes months, but that's typical for large projects). Apple on the other hand is just a black hole for bug reports, you never hear anything back.
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    It's like the Chrome team realizes it actually has users. Many other software projects I've witnessed seem to think they just throw their stuff into the void and nobody will care.
ametrau 3y ago
Yeah avoid all ms made UI libraries
datadeft 3y ago
The only usable service or software from any company that is in the critical path for their own use. Examples: - AWS is in the critical path for Amazon - .Net is in the critical path for MS If you chose a software or service that is not in the critical path, the jokes are on you.
dtx1 3y ago
Speaking as a former Windows Phone Developer: Yeah, this is roughly what developing for Windows Phone and the UWP felt like. Half Baked Tech Demos with glaring, basic Issues that never get fixed. It feels like Microsoft internally still thinks they are such a monopoly that people WILL adopt whatever they get fed by them and when that inevitably doesn't they never fix all the Issues required to be competitive. A modern UI Framework of any kind is a massive undertaking, especially when it is not browser based. A modern UI Framework that is not Browser based and gets any kind of traction is almost impossible at this point. The Developer Experience would have to be at least as good as Browser based development and you'd have to show significant progress in cross Plattform development for anyone to care.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  I was actually hopeful they'd make it at some point. Browser-based UI frameworks aren't very good on mobile - They had a chance here. But it's a classic Microsoft move to take the potential you have and throw it away.
bob1029 3y ago
We are huge into Microsoft but MAUI is on the no touch list. After maintaining a Blazor (server-side) app for a few years, it has become clear to me that even if the abstractions are ideal, the tooling may cripple the entire experience. I don't trust Visual Studio 2022 to not treat me like a piece of shit in a UI style project anymore. The only project types I really trust to not suck are: class library, console app, and azure function (timer or http triggers). If Microsoft wants me to give their UI frameworks another shot, then I challenge them to rewrite visual studio itself using whatever proposed framework. Only then would I have faith that someone sorted out all the long-tailed dragons that would bite me in the ass 2 years deep.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  Visual Studio hasn't not treated me like a piece of shit ever. It's a similar "lol fuck you" as witnessed in this issue.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  What UI framework should I be focusing on in 2023? Should I focus on web-based framework (vis-a-vis Electron or similar platform) or is there something more suitable for desktop UI?
  - bob1029 3y ago
    We do web-only right now. No frameworks. Maybe focus on MDN if you think you can get the business done with a webapp. Once you master flex, grid & friends, you will be set free. If we are still insisting upon native apps, I am growing increasingly-curious as to what the reason could possibly be. Unreal & Unity deploy to the browser. What does your business do that is so special by comparison?
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      HTML is a bad replacement for a proper UI toolkit, that's the appeal. There are so many problems that good UI toolkits and languages solve that HTML just ignores and always will. But, Chrome gets a massive budget, web apps are easy to deploy thanks to the ubiquity of browsers, and there's safety in numbers, so those things usually outweigh the other concerns. Doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of scope to compete with HTML.
Zetobal 3y ago
Don't get me started on MS and UX libraries everything you need to know about microsoft and the state of UX is is that they are trying to implement a complete darkmode for windows since 2015 and are still failing at it.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  The news would be that they're trying. It doesn't look to me like they put much effort into pretty much anything. Sure, they build products, but only to the point of being infuratingly unreliable.
Ecstatify 3y ago
We decommissioned all our mobile apps built with Xamarin. Some of the Microsoft teams don't listen to user feedback. We use Azure DevOps, feedback from years ago for basic features still not developed. https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/AzureDevOps https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/AzureDevOps
- hhh 3y ago
  MS running two major code repo platforms, one that is hated, and one that’s widely loved, leads me to believe ADO is not going to make it.
  - my123 3y ago
    Azure DevOps gets wide internal use at least: Windows source code is hosted on it.
- ratg13 3y ago
  I’ve talked with people at MS that have told me Azure DevOps is no longer in active development. You should start your migration to GitHub actions.
  - LikesPwsh 3y ago
    MS don't seem entirely on the same page there. Azure Devops was their first choice for Power BI integration for some reason. https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=02007825-a60e-ee11-a81c-000d3a0ec312 https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=020078...
    - ratg13 3y ago
      Correct, I've only heard this from two people and this is only their take. This is not an official position. But the fact that people within the company are saying this to me directly is enough to get me to believe it. I wouldn't trust a random person on the internet saying stuff like this either, but even without any inside knowledge, it's just logical that they should try and limit time spent developing two of the exact same product .. and I think it's probably becoming apparent to you as well which one is on the chopping block.
solarkraft 3y ago
Closed without a comment. I was hopeful, but not fully convinced that Microsoft had turned around. Turns out that the naysayers were, of course, completely right. No touching of Microsoft frameworks. Dotnet may look good, but this will happen to it too.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Technically, it got moved into being a discussion, as the underlying bug (the thing that's been broken for 1.5 years) actually still has its original issue open, so this the actual bug report of this issue is basically a dupe. I mean, this is still an awful look for MAUI.
- tester756 3y ago
  It was moved to discussion.
WoodenChair 3y ago
We tried building a greenfield mobile app using Maui because my development partner is a Microsoft tools aficionado. We ran into a big memory leak that was so hard to debug using the primitive tools that it set us back a month. Eventually, we discovered it was internal to Maui (leak caused by a Maui component, not our code) and decided to program native apps instead for the project. Ultimately I think rebuilding as native actually saved us time for the simple app we’re building
- jwells89 3y ago
  It’s counterintuitive, but yes, depending on the project cross-platform frameworks can actually be harder for small teams or one-person operations to manage well because they increase the number of layers in which bugs and quirks can show up in — instead of just e.g. Mac AppKit and Windows Win32 bugs, you’ve now got to deal with those plus whatever bugs the cross platform framework has. This is particularly true for projects where the UI is not overly complex (and thus, not where most of your energy is going), in which case it can make more sense to do code sharing in a library that’s pure business logic (no UI) and platform independent.
tren 3y ago
We're a dotnet shop and we're looking to rewrite our iOS and Android apps in a cross platform framework. On paper MAUI seems like the perfect fit but reading through the discussion and issues in GitHub it's nearly guaranteed this will go the way of all MS's UI products. The number of unresolved issues for fairly basic functionality and the number of developers voicing their PTSD from MAUI related development has made us steer clear.
- zerr 3y ago
  Uno Platform or Avalonia should be a better fit.
thenerdhead 3y ago
Title should be "Developer yells at .NET MAUI team and expects to talk to the manager because their bug hasn't been fixed in two years". I hope people can see the hostile working conditions that many in open source have to experience daily. There is no possible way for a small team to scale with the thousands of issues they get and give every single one the same amount of attention. That is why it is so important for people to upvote and engage in issues. It gives the product and engineering teams a way to gauge priority. There are much better ways to go about ranting about product defects though. Doing it in this way just encourages people to pitchfork. We all know that pitchforking isn't productive at all. In fact, it hurts more than you think it helps.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Oh it is very much possible to scale. Just drop the agile process, give the devs agency and fix the bugs. Easely like 100x the efficiency fixing small bugs.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    But 0x efficiency developing new features.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      That is debatable.
  - MrGilbert 3y ago
    Dev with agency here. There is clearly an issue, but "agile" is not it. "Agile" doesn’t mean "ship unfinished products and never care for issues". In fact, it means quite the opposite: Start with as little as possible, as polished as possible and improve from there. It's actually quite nice to work with, if every role is on the same page.
    - zihotki 3y ago
      I wonder where you've found that definition of "agile". The agile manifesto says that they have come to value: 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working software over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Responding to change over following a plan There is no direct quality/polishness in there. Edit: formatting
xrd 3y ago
I tried to use the MSTeams API in the last year. It (the example GitHub repo) was obviously basically abandoned by MS except for some third world subcontractors that I'm sure a PM at Microsoft was managing while she managed her 401k and coasting into retirement. What a mess.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Glad I dodged that bullet. I really wanted to build a portfolio project with MAUI to have something cross-platform but was already wary because of Microsoft's non-stop parade of overlapping, half working, UI frameworks. I experimented with MAUI for a couple of days but kept running into issues on the most basic of things, only to find out it was a known issue that had been left unaddressed for an extended period of time. From the outside, it seems crazy that a multi-trillion dollar company would put out a product this broken and leave it that way for a long time but anyone familiar with the internal workings of Microsoft sees this as another case of a team having lost some insider battle and banished to nether reaches of the company, starved of anything more than token resources, to slowly decay to death.
- maonaoda 3y ago
  Please don't try maui, it will be a disaster. The migration from XF to Maui has been on the verge of collapse.
TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
There are some really nasty bugs in MAUI, which are not even obviously reported by error messages. From my experience: * You can build MAUI application fine, but you won't be able to deploy it for Windows and run it, unless your repository lives in C:\ drive. And I mean C:\ drive, not substed directory to D:\ not additional drive. C:\somePath\ only. The worst thing is that error which you get is completely ambiguous and does not tell where is a problem. * You would think that you can bypass requirement above by forcing Visual Studio to deploy on C:\somePath\bin? Yeah that works for Windows, Android but does not work for iOS/MacOS emitters, where somebody automatically assumes that all path are relative. So instead of C:\somePath\bin MacOS/iOS emitters will try to build into D:\PathToMyRepo\C:\somePath\bin , obviously ending with an error. I think that MAUI is great product and I like the universal outcome (deploy for all major platforms at once), but my god, myriad of stupid bugs is very annoying.
whalesalad 3y ago
In the context of Microsoft: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the 8,423rd time… well you get the idea.
rayiner 3y ago
Does anyone have the inside scoop on what happened to Microsoft? They were never great in terms of software development, but it seems like they have become completely unable to develop products. Win32 lasted for decades, but I’ve lost count of how many successor frameworks have come and gone. Products like OneNote or Outlook get replaced with new versions that have a fraction of the features and are walruses of bloat. (It’s been years, and “New” Outlook still pops you over to the web to look at your todos.) “New” Teams can’t even keep up with scrolling a large directory listing, when mapping the same share in Windows Explorer results in instant display. This is shit smart high schoolers could do and did back in the day. Microsoft seems to have fallen off a cliff. What happened?
nullc 3y ago
If I got an issue that started with "DO NOT CLOSE THIS ISSUE BECAUSE YOU THINK IT DOEN'T MEET THE CRITERIA OF A VALID ISSUE!" I would be pretty inclined to close it without reading further.
kvonhorn 3y ago
> How does this stuff pass QA?????? Microsoft notoriously fired all their QA engineers back in 2014. I would assume that QA is no longer a core competency at Microsoft. I'm guessing that they have testing tasks that are now performed by contractors, but no actual _process_ in place to assure quality. The only engineering process now is agile. My experience as a QA engineer testing software in agile environments in the last 15 years or so is that my attention every sprint is focused first on assuring that the features implement the user stories, and second that the automated regression tests are written and checked into version control. This automation task is where the majority of my 80 hours every sprint is spent. There is no time to check for bugs by way of, say, ad-hoc testing. If I'm a contractor, all the buttons are on the screen, and the only issue is that the buttons aren't centered, then I'll enter a bug for the alignment issue as a low priority fix and clear the feature to ship. I might POSSIBLY perhaps maybe add a note to the bug suggesting a workaround by sending an InvalidateRect message to the window containing the buttons, but I doubt it knowing that the developer outside of the team would never read it. I will absolutely NOT be an advocate for the developer experience and refuse to clear the feature to ship with this bug knowing how tenuous my employment status is, however. I would guess that that's how this bug passes QA in the first place. Edit: Clarified a few statements.
Voultapher 3y ago
So .NET MAUI doesn't even support Linux https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/supported-platforms?view=net-maui-8.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/supported-plat... that alone would be a non starter for me.

151 points by yell0wsnow 3y ago

We're working on a MAUI app at work right now. Although I believe the MAUI developers are doing the best they can with a shitty situation (just not enough developers or QA staff for such a complex project), I can say my experience with MAUI has been horrible. I'm curious as to whether any React Native devs here have had any similar issues? I wonder if all this crap is just what happens when you're trying to do a cross-platform (native) UI framework. It seems that there are people who love React Native (for example Theo Browne) [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_FcxGCCnUs&t=19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_FcxGCCnUs&t=19

yell0wsnow 3y ago

I was browsing the dotnet/maui repo and the vibes over there are not great. decided to give the framework a quick spin myself and for god sake, this thing is in terrible shape. I built a quick holy grail layout with basic content and it looks completely different on all platforms. basic controls are not working and collections are laggy. seems that nobody in the team really uses this thing in production or interacts with the community more of the same https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/17917 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/17917 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/15203 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/15203

superchroma 3y ago

Yeah, it's over. Avalonia has blossomed into a functional framework in the time it's taken for MAUI to get to wherever here is. It's basically a drop-in replacement for WPF in terms of controls, to a degree that honestly surprised me. The default styling isn't that sexy, but you can change it, just like WPF, so I'd say it's mission complete as far as ordinary apps are concerned! I think Microsoft has given up on facilitating application development beyond VS and C#.

ecmascript 3y ago

The problem with using Microsofts stuff is that is half baked all the time and it's hard to fix. I have made an Xamarin Forms app and it was hard to do things that were not basic. Just use the web platform unless you really, really need to do something specific which cannot be done as a web app.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Three decades of experience talking here: If you don't see a vendor like Microsoft using a GUI framework for at least 50% of their new applications, then you've made a terrible mistake in adopting it yourself. Microsoft uses Google's framework for their own applications: Electron. Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft, a nearly 3 trillion dollar company, uses the framework of a competitor for their own desktop applications. Teams: Electron. Visual Studio Code: Electron. Azure Data Studio: Electron. Now, let's make a similar list for Microsoft MAUI apps! Umm... err... hmm...

ecmascript 3y ago
Electron is owned by Github which is owned by Microsoft tho. They also own npm and typescript. So Microsoft themselves has been moving away from native apps a long time so your main point is still valid.
MyFirstSass 3y ago
This is bizarre to me. What applications are they actually using the framework for? Is it because it's easier to make cross platform? Reminds a bit of when i used Angular back in the day and it seemed Google of all people didn't use it for any of their many web services.
- hu3 3y ago
  Angular is prime example. From my consulting experience, Angular (Google tech), is most used today along with .NET backends (Microsoft tech). I don't think I ever saw a client using Angular + Go, for example.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    Ive seen angular with c#, java, python and node backends. Angular though is mostly popular with big enterprise non tech companies, more industry differences than tech differences.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Microsoft hasn't really dogfooded their own external facing GUI frameworks in forever. It's not a great look, but to some degree it also made sense. These frameworks (especially the dumpster fire ones) are .NET/C# (usually with XAML) frameworks, designed (it feels like) primarily to build line of business internal applications, with cross-platformness tacked on in more recent years. The grand-daddy of all of these would be WPF (all the way back in 2006). Basically Microsoft's flagship non-developer apps (ie Office Suite) is its own little kingdom. They never bought into any of the developer facing C# frameworks that MS created (makes sense I guess?... Office isn't a C# code base). Office basically developed its own visual language and internal framework. Visual Studio itself actually got some WPF back in the day (though I understood the code base to be kind of what you expect of something of its heritage). I imagine it still has WPF to this day. Their newer apps - especially the ones that are actually trying to be cross platform (like Teams, VSCode and friends). Well, Teams has the excuse that they need a web version anyways, so Electron really does make sense (see Discord and Slack). VSCode... the first version of VSCode came out in 2015 (omg..... it actually released a few months before Windows 10). MS had no in-house cross platform solution at that time. At that time, they did have a partnership with Xamarin (Xamarin would later be acquisition). .NET MAUI is the evolution of Xamarin. But Xamarin I always understood to be a bit of a dumpster fire. I was evaluating our choices for a small windows desktop app back in ~2015-2016. Xamarin did not seem appealing. After a misfire with UWP (another MS footgun I think), we just did WPF (cross-platform not required). Honestly, I wouldn't expect anything that could even remotely be described as an "IDE" to NOT be based on the VSCode code base now. MS has something -very- good going for it there. And I guess this is kind of one of the challenges. The part of MS that builds apps, is not really related to the part of the MS that builds GUI frameworks for external developers. And the part of the MS that builds apps does not really want their success to be tied to this dumpster fire.

nor0x 3y ago

Also the foundation for MAUI, the native bindings for .NET are incomplete and broken. Back in the Xamarin days the promise was that "everything you can do natively you can do in .NET" - this hasn't been true for a long time. Most of the new frameworks, especially on the iOS side don't have a binding and Microsoft doesn't have a story for Swift based libraries at all

rafaelmn 3y ago

few months ago I tried to wrap up a MAUI PoC app from a more junior coworker, who failed to deliver anything working after weeks of trying. Then I spent two weeks on trivial shit and stuff you expect to work by default (pull to refresh, video streaming, video in list view etc.) After two weeks of stress, failure and dozen of known issues on GitHub with tons of frustrated developers [1], I rewrote the whole poc in flutter in 3 days. Keep in mind this was a simple app with two screens and sign in/sign up - the only thing mildly technicall was a list view with videos (video feed). Literally nothing in MAUI worked as advertised and their showoff apps are ridiculous. The build process takes forever and breaks randomly, iteration is slow and debugging breaks all the time. This is the exact same experience I've had with Xamarin 5-6 years ago. Any imaginary gain you think you'll have by being able to share code between client and server will be offset many times by having a sane/working dev environment like flutter (working framework, fast iteration) and the language isn't that far off from c#. [1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8926#issuecomment-1563097522 https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8926#issuecomment-1563...

baz00 3y ago

> "It seems to me that this is the end for Microsoft's mobile team. They do not fix own bugs, they do not respond to the tickets, the even do not review PRs made a year ago" That's always been the case with all of their frameworks. Even if the entire userbase is spitting fire the default position is to double down on whatever stupid thing they're doing or ignoring it. Only time I ever got anything fixed was when I was working for an MS partner and we threatened to become an Oracle partner. Then again the OSS community is only slightly better and Apple is definitely worse!

CoastalCoder 3y ago
Since we're talking about GUI frameworks, I wonder how Qt fares in terms of bugs and fixing them.
- baz00 3y ago
  Well Qt on macOS is a shit show. I pretty much had to move half my stuff off Mac because two Qt based programs I work on regularly keep breaking every time they update macOS.

agilob 3y ago

What? A multibilion corporation does not listen to user feedback on GitHub? That's so crazy and unusual. Take some lessons from Google here, when users complained on quality of software and bugs in it, Google just archived OSS repos and moved development to private repo. Opensource and issues on repos are close to worthless (sometimes somebody else in comments will find a solution or work on a fork, but that's it), might as well be not available at all.

flohofwoe 3y ago
The Chrome team must be an exception then, my bug reports there usually get prompt feedback, and when those were actual problems they also get fixed in time (sometimes it takes months, but that's typical for large projects). Apple on the other hand is just a black hole for bug reports, you never hear anything back.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  It's like the Chrome team realizes it actually has users. Many other software projects I've witnessed seem to think they just throw their stuff into the void and nobody will care.

ametrau 3y ago

Yeah avoid all ms made UI libraries

datadeft 3y ago

The only usable service or software from any company that is in the critical path for their own use. Examples: - AWS is in the critical path for Amazon - .Net is in the critical path for MS If you chose a software or service that is not in the critical path, the jokes are on you.

dtx1 3y ago

Speaking as a former Windows Phone Developer: Yeah, this is roughly what developing for Windows Phone and the UWP felt like. Half Baked Tech Demos with glaring, basic Issues that never get fixed. It feels like Microsoft internally still thinks they are such a monopoly that people WILL adopt whatever they get fed by them and when that inevitably doesn't they never fix all the Issues required to be competitive. A modern UI Framework of any kind is a massive undertaking, especially when it is not browser based. A modern UI Framework that is not Browser based and gets any kind of traction is almost impossible at this point. The Developer Experience would have to be at least as good as Browser based development and you'd have to show significant progress in cross Plattform development for anyone to care.

solarkraft 3y ago
I was actually hopeful they'd make it at some point. Browser-based UI frameworks aren't very good on mobile - They had a chance here. But it's a classic Microsoft move to take the potential you have and throw it away.

bob1029 3y ago

We are huge into Microsoft but MAUI is on the no touch list. After maintaining a Blazor (server-side) app for a few years, it has become clear to me that even if the abstractions are ideal, the tooling may cripple the entire experience. I don't trust Visual Studio 2022 to not treat me like a piece of shit in a UI style project anymore. The only project types I really trust to not suck are: class library, console app, and azure function (timer or http triggers). If Microsoft wants me to give their UI frameworks another shot, then I challenge them to rewrite visual studio itself using whatever proposed framework. Only then would I have faith that someone sorted out all the long-tailed dragons that would bite me in the ass 2 years deep.

solarkraft 3y ago
Visual Studio hasn't not treated me like a piece of shit ever. It's a similar "lol fuck you" as witnessed in this issue.
deafpolygon 3y ago
What UI framework should I be focusing on in 2023? Should I focus on web-based framework (vis-a-vis Electron or similar platform) or is there something more suitable for desktop UI?
- bob1029 3y ago
  We do web-only right now. No frameworks. Maybe focus on MDN if you think you can get the business done with a webapp. Once you master flex, grid & friends, you will be set free. If we are still insisting upon native apps, I am growing increasingly-curious as to what the reason could possibly be. Unreal & Unity deploy to the browser. What does your business do that is so special by comparison?
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    HTML is a bad replacement for a proper UI toolkit, that's the appeal. There are so many problems that good UI toolkits and languages solve that HTML just ignores and always will. But, Chrome gets a massive budget, web apps are easy to deploy thanks to the ubiquity of browsers, and there's safety in numbers, so those things usually outweigh the other concerns. Doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of scope to compete with HTML.

Zetobal 3y ago

Don't get me started on MS and UX libraries everything you need to know about microsoft and the state of UX is is that they are trying to implement a complete darkmode for windows since 2015 and are still failing at it.

solarkraft 3y ago
The news would be that they're trying. It doesn't look to me like they put much effort into pretty much anything. Sure, they build products, but only to the point of being infuratingly unreliable.

Ecstatify 3y ago

We decommissioned all our mobile apps built with Xamarin. Some of the Microsoft teams don't listen to user feedback. We use Azure DevOps, feedback from years ago for basic features still not developed. https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/AzureDevOps https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/AzureDevOps

hhh 3y ago
MS running two major code repo platforms, one that is hated, and one that’s widely loved, leads me to believe ADO is not going to make it.
- my123 3y ago
  Azure DevOps gets wide internal use at least: Windows source code is hosted on it.
ratg13 3y ago
I’ve talked with people at MS that have told me Azure DevOps is no longer in active development. You should start your migration to GitHub actions.
- LikesPwsh 3y ago
  MS don't seem entirely on the same page there. Azure Devops was their first choice for Power BI integration for some reason. https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=02007825-a60e-ee11-a81c-000d3a0ec312 https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=020078...
  - ratg13 3y ago
    Correct, I've only heard this from two people and this is only their take. This is not an official position. But the fact that people within the company are saying this to me directly is enough to get me to believe it. I wouldn't trust a random person on the internet saying stuff like this either, but even without any inside knowledge, it's just logical that they should try and limit time spent developing two of the exact same product .. and I think it's probably becoming apparent to you as well which one is on the chopping block.

solarkraft 3y ago

Closed without a comment. I was hopeful, but not fully convinced that Microsoft had turned around. Turns out that the naysayers were, of course, completely right. No touching of Microsoft frameworks. Dotnet may look good, but this will happen to it too.

icegreentea2 3y ago
Technically, it got moved into being a discussion, as the underlying bug (the thing that's been broken for 1.5 years) actually still has its original issue open, so this the actual bug report of this issue is basically a dupe. I mean, this is still an awful look for MAUI.
tester756 3y ago
It was moved to discussion.

WoodenChair 3y ago

We tried building a greenfield mobile app using Maui because my development partner is a Microsoft tools aficionado. We ran into a big memory leak that was so hard to debug using the primitive tools that it set us back a month. Eventually, we discovered it was internal to Maui (leak caused by a Maui component, not our code) and decided to program native apps instead for the project. Ultimately I think rebuilding as native actually saved us time for the simple app we’re building

jwells89 3y ago
It’s counterintuitive, but yes, depending on the project cross-platform frameworks can actually be harder for small teams or one-person operations to manage well because they increase the number of layers in which bugs and quirks can show up in — instead of just e.g. Mac AppKit and Windows Win32 bugs, you’ve now got to deal with those plus whatever bugs the cross platform framework has. This is particularly true for projects where the UI is not overly complex (and thus, not where most of your energy is going), in which case it can make more sense to do code sharing in a library that’s pure business logic (no UI) and platform independent.

tren 3y ago

We're a dotnet shop and we're looking to rewrite our iOS and Android apps in a cross platform framework. On paper MAUI seems like the perfect fit but reading through the discussion and issues in GitHub it's nearly guaranteed this will go the way of all MS's UI products. The number of unresolved issues for fairly basic functionality and the number of developers voicing their PTSD from MAUI related development has made us steer clear.

zerr 3y ago
Uno Platform or Avalonia should be a better fit.

thenerdhead 3y ago

Title should be "Developer yells at .NET MAUI team and expects to talk to the manager because their bug hasn't been fixed in two years". I hope people can see the hostile working conditions that many in open source have to experience daily. There is no possible way for a small team to scale with the thousands of issues they get and give every single one the same amount of attention. That is why it is so important for people to upvote and engage in issues. It gives the product and engineering teams a way to gauge priority. There are much better ways to go about ranting about product defects though. Doing it in this way just encourages people to pitchfork. We all know that pitchforking isn't productive at all. In fact, it hurts more than you think it helps.

rightbyte 3y ago
Oh it is very much possible to scale. Just drop the agile process, give the devs agency and fix the bugs. Easely like 100x the efficiency fixing small bugs.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  But 0x efficiency developing new features.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    That is debatable.
- MrGilbert 3y ago
  Dev with agency here. There is clearly an issue, but "agile" is not it. "Agile" doesn’t mean "ship unfinished products and never care for issues". In fact, it means quite the opposite: Start with as little as possible, as polished as possible and improve from there. It's actually quite nice to work with, if every role is on the same page.
  - zihotki 3y ago
    I wonder where you've found that definition of "agile". The agile manifesto says that they have come to value: 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working software over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Responding to change over following a plan There is no direct quality/polishness in there. Edit: formatting

xrd 3y ago

I tried to use the MSTeams API in the last year. It (the example GitHub repo) was obviously basically abandoned by MS except for some third world subcontractors that I'm sure a PM at Microsoft was managing while she managed her 401k and coasting into retirement. What a mess.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

Glad I dodged that bullet. I really wanted to build a portfolio project with MAUI to have something cross-platform but was already wary because of Microsoft's non-stop parade of overlapping, half working, UI frameworks. I experimented with MAUI for a couple of days but kept running into issues on the most basic of things, only to find out it was a known issue that had been left unaddressed for an extended period of time. From the outside, it seems crazy that a multi-trillion dollar company would put out a product this broken and leave it that way for a long time but anyone familiar with the internal workings of Microsoft sees this as another case of a team having lost some insider battle and banished to nether reaches of the company, starved of anything more than token resources, to slowly decay to death.

maonaoda 3y ago
Please don't try maui, it will be a disaster. The migration from XF to Maui has been on the verge of collapse.

TheLoafOfBread 3y ago

There are some really nasty bugs in MAUI, which are not even obviously reported by error messages. From my experience: * You can build MAUI application fine, but you won't be able to deploy it for Windows and run it, unless your repository lives in C:\ drive. And I mean C:\ drive, not substed directory to D:\ not additional drive. C:\somePath\ only. The worst thing is that error which you get is completely ambiguous and does not tell where is a problem. * You would think that you can bypass requirement above by forcing Visual Studio to deploy on C:\somePath\bin? Yeah that works for Windows, Android but does not work for iOS/MacOS emitters, where somebody automatically assumes that all path are relative. So instead of C:\somePath\bin MacOS/iOS emitters will try to build into D:\PathToMyRepo\C:\somePath\bin , obviously ending with an error. I think that MAUI is great product and I like the universal outcome (deploy for all major platforms at once), but my god, myriad of stupid bugs is very annoying.

whalesalad 3y ago

In the context of Microsoft: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the 8,423rd time… well you get the idea.

rayiner 3y ago

Does anyone have the inside scoop on what happened to Microsoft? They were never great in terms of software development, but it seems like they have become completely unable to develop products. Win32 lasted for decades, but I’ve lost count of how many successor frameworks have come and gone. Products like OneNote or Outlook get replaced with new versions that have a fraction of the features and are walruses of bloat. (It’s been years, and “New” Outlook still pops you over to the web to look at your todos.) “New” Teams can’t even keep up with scrolling a large directory listing, when mapping the same share in Windows Explorer results in instant display. This is shit smart high schoolers could do and did back in the day. Microsoft seems to have fallen off a cliff. What happened?

nullc 3y ago

If I got an issue that started with "DO NOT CLOSE THIS ISSUE BECAUSE YOU THINK IT DOEN'T MEET THE CRITERIA OF A VALID ISSUE!" I would be pretty inclined to close it without reading further.

kvonhorn 3y ago

> How does this stuff pass QA?????? Microsoft notoriously fired all their QA engineers back in 2014. I would assume that QA is no longer a core competency at Microsoft. I'm guessing that they have testing tasks that are now performed by contractors, but no actual _process_ in place to assure quality. The only engineering process now is agile. My experience as a QA engineer testing software in agile environments in the last 15 years or so is that my attention every sprint is focused first on assuring that the features implement the user stories, and second that the automated regression tests are written and checked into version control. This automation task is where the majority of my 80 hours every sprint is spent. There is no time to check for bugs by way of, say, ad-hoc testing. If I'm a contractor, all the buttons are on the screen, and the only issue is that the buttons aren't centered, then I'll enter a bug for the alignment issue as a low priority fix and clear the feature to ship. I might POSSIBLY perhaps maybe add a note to the bug suggesting a workaround by sending an InvalidateRect message to the window containing the buttons, but I doubt it knowing that the developer outside of the team would never read it. I will absolutely NOT be an advocate for the developer experience and refuse to clear the feature to ship with this bug knowing how tenuous my employment status is, however. I would guess that that's how this bug passes QA in the first place. Edit: Clarified a few statements.

Voultapher 3y ago

So .NET MAUI doesn't even support Linux https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/supported-platforms?view=net-maui-8.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/supported-plat... that alone would be a non starter for me.