6 ms·

In the .NET ecosystem, I have noticed people to shame .NET MAUI because Microsoft themselves don't use this framework - Microsoft Team is built on Electron and

In the .NET ecosystem, I have noticed people to shame .NET MAUI because Microsoft themselves don't use this framework - Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI. Why build a product on MAUI when Microsoft aren't too sure about it.

gfody 11mo ago
microsofts own stuff never seems to be what gets momentum. there's a strong aftermarket for better ways like back in the borland era bcb and delphi, the more things change the more they stay the same!
layer8 11mo ago
Generally speaking, I wouldn’t take what Microsoft uses as guidance nowadays, given a lot of the software they produce. (This is not an endorsement of MAUI.)
vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
That has been a problem since forever. Microsoft themselves rarely used the tools they gave to developers. SourceSafe, MFC, WPF and the .NET frameworks that followed were only for 3rd party devs. And when they used these tools, the software usually got worse. One example was Visual Studio. 2008 was really nice with great customization and good performance. Then they wrote 2010 with MFC and it was slow and lost tons of features. I think it’s better on the server side with ASP.NET. As far as I have heard MAUI is pretty buggy and has lost momentum. It will probably go on the long list of basically abandoned .NET UI frameworks
- okanat 11mo ago
  You are mixing your UI frameworks and versions. VS 2010 is written in WPF. WPF is / was Windows Vista's and 7's UX. Old Control Panel in Win 10/11 still is WPF. All the wizards like ClearType wizard is WPF. MFC is much older (1992). Unfortunately Microsoft likes to jump into bandwagons and many engineers at the company seem to like to reinvent stuff rather than adopt. WPF, WinUI2 and WinUI3 all share the same Xaml based structure. So they could have adopted WPF. It is not that Microsoft doesn't develop advanced UIs with their frameworks. WPF is still well-used by Windows and other Microsoft utilities like Windows Terminal. They are just stupidly abandoning their built up bases for silly industry fads. They jumped into tablet / touchscreen / hybrid-mobile-desktop bandwagon in late-2010s and tried to force WinUI as an UWP-only feature. It resulted in low adoption. They didn't adopt WPF to have same theming. When WinUI2 failed, they tried to make modern C++ a reality and tried to remove UWP restrictions which is a good decision. However they diverted quite a bit resources into AI slop generation now and WinUI3 just languishes. Same for MAUI. They tried to get into multi-platform, multi-device framework as a way to generate leads into Microsoft ecosystem. They try to use various frameworks and UI stuff to get people hooked into the ecosystem and find ways to upgrade them into Azure and M365 customers. It is meaningless and tiring. All of those could be only WPF. It is like Google and its many Bazel-like build systems (but not full Bazel) for each of Chrome, Fuschia and Android.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
    Oh yes. I mistyped. 2010 was written in WPF
  - sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
    Everything you say is using WPF is not actually using WPF, other than Visual Studio.
latentsea 11mo ago
Never build a frontend on a .NET technology. Period. They always end up unsupported in the end. Just use standard web technologies and thank yourself later. I've been a .NET dev for a decade now and that's what I've learnt.
- password4321 11mo ago
  Except WinForms, spectacular for Windows-only utility GUIs.
  - glzone1 11mo ago
    No kidding - kind of wild that winforms is still kind of a gold standard experience today! I actually liked VB Forms - lots of easy rapid application development was possible.
    - issafram 11mo ago
      WPF as well
      - memsom 11mo ago
        I like WPF and I code with it regularly, but the drag and drop UI builder was the worst aspect of WPF and generated terrible Xaml that was almost impossible to maintain.
    - memsom 11mo ago
      Delphi was the best RAD tool though. It was native code, not a weird interpreted or jitted app. It could also build to a single exe file. VB struggled with an unwieldy engine for most of its life.
  - fuzzzerd 11mo ago
    > spectacular Not exactly the word I'd use, since it really hasn't changed since VB4, but it's definitely reliable and stable.
Kyrio 11mo ago
These days, I think Microsoft's web-based desktop apps mostly use WebView2 directly instead of Electron, so they don't have to bundle a browser. I think for Teams it happened at the same time that they moved from Angular to React. The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET. Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.
- weq 11mo ago
  Ive been building these apps (cross platform web based ui, C# backend) for years, and yes its finally good to see MS catch up and validate the architecture ive pushed since Xamarin. I wrote once wrote an electron version of this archand thought wtf are people doing? Things can be so much easier when you use a platform that knows how to multi-thread. At stages i had to build adapters/upstream patches for Chromeiunium directly onto Mac and Linux, and its was a major pain having to debug C calls. Ive been using the same framework now for 10+yrs on apps in the stores, i wrote a small layer infront of the webviews and can swap out webkit, chrome, edge on demand. You really dont need much, just a constand way to boostrap logic and UI. 90% of code is shared across all platforms, there are def differences in WebView engines that you sometimes come across but those parts just get swapped out with browser specific JS. Ive found bugs and worked with browser teams at all vendors doing this and to see how simple this is with Dotnet these days compared to when i started is refreshing. Its easily the most stable cross-platform framework around, if you are stuck using something like flutter i pitty you, its just eletron with another skin. I can swap out and integrate directly with OS libs when i need to do stuff that the dotnet team hasnt gotten around to yet without re-writing. This has mean i really havnt used MAUI at all, but if i need to or could take advantage of it i can mix it on an Ui element by element basis. I prefer webUIs though, i have the chose to handle anything with either JS, WASM, or a combination. I can use traditional JS frameworks or traditional Native UI frameworks. If i had started this process later, avalonia seemed to have the closest thing i required. It was just a bit a more complex /based on WinUI (which i dont really enjoy) but it supported all platforms and gave lower level api access. MS were smart, that canabalanised all these community effort and brought them into the fold. Every dotnet webview impl was a successfull community driven project before. They didnt write anything themselves from scratch.
mdasen 11mo ago
> Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI Microsoft Teams was released in March 2017. .NET MAUI was released in May 2022. In 2021, Microsoft replaced Angular with React and moved away from Electron to WebView2 (using the OS' built-in renderer rather than a bundled Chromium). So even the rewrite was a year before MAUI (and they probably started the rewrite before 2021). Plus, part of the point of using React there was that they could basically replace Angular bit by bit. Microsoft Teams is just older than MAUI. It's like asking why Hadoop is written in Java and not Go or Rust or why Kafka is written in Scala and not Kotlin. Kafka was open sourced in January 2011 and Kotlin came out in July 2011. Kotlin wasn't an option given that they were developing it years before the language was released. That's not to say that Microsoft's attitude toward MAUI doesn't leave concerns. There was some news a while back about a bunch of layoffs around MAUI. It's always concerning when there doesn't appear to be any dog-fooding going on - is this just some junk they're throwing at us that they don't want to use? I think some hesitation also comes from the Blazor side where it's looking like Microsoft doesn't really see Blazor as a React competitor so much as a way for internal company apps to be made quickly - in contrast to the Google IO presentations on WASM support for Dart/Flutter where they were emphasizing better-than-JS performance. That said, Microsoft hasn't really released a lot of new (green field) stuff over the past 2-3 years. What product should they have made in MAUI, but didn't? You can't say Teams because that was a giant product way before MAUI even existed. Most of what Microsoft is doing is work on existing products - things they released before 2023/2024 and were in development before MAUI existed. Flutter had a 5 year head start on MAUI. But there certainly is a feeling that Microsoft doesn't feel committed to it or at least not enough to put its weight behind it.
- tcoff91 11mo ago
  Microsoft seems more committed to react native than MAUI.
- debugnik 11mo ago
  Teams is not older than MAUI because MAUI was mostly a rebrand of Xamarin Forms.
  - 11mo ago
georgemcbay 11mo ago
MAUI was horrible when I tried using it about a year ago, tons of bugs, pretty iffy comms/support from the MAUI team as to timelines when things might get fixed, etc. Eventually dumped it and moved to Kotlin Compose/Multiplatform, which is just so much better at achieving a similar goal (though, obviously, without being part of the .NET ecosystem).
DANmode 11mo ago
Why invest strongly in a desktop-first framework when society aren’t too sure about it? MAUI was to get them through to where everyone wants webapps - served from an Azure backend, of course.
oaiey 11mo ago
The answer to that is well known: Windows division builds WinUI/Win32 as their native C++/COM API, Office division went to React on their path to the web and the dev division fills gaps (WPF) and provides tools for external and internal devs (Maui for cross platform uis). It is history not the lack of will. At one point the windows division was in shambles (remember vista) and WPF pops up. At another point, the windows and dev division have no answers to the office group (because you know who uses non win tech) so they went react. And then external devs screamed: where is the .net cross platform story so Microsoft acquired xamarin and later form Maui out of it. It is history not lack of trust. But the outcome is the same: lackluster support for all UI toolkits.
- dukeofharen 11mo ago
  I understood (can not confirm it though) that the new start menu in Windows 11 was built using React Native, so yet another ui framework in the mix.
- bonesss 11mo ago
  Well summarized, and just as shocking today as it was every minute while it developed. Someone needs to remind those cats that they own the platform. Being able to sanely develop apps for and on that platform should be possible, and UI kinda-sorta matters for that. At a certain point with the MFC they had it dialled in, while pioneering asynchronous browser tech, with many best in class tools. Decades later with a cross-platform cloud-centric stack they have a shrug emoji as big and wide as the eyes can see, and no sense this basic question of development will ever get improved. Ballmer chanting ‘developers, developers, developers …’ springs to mind.
  - skeeter2020 11mo ago
    Ballmer was not my favourite person to run MS, but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in. Early Nadella days too. Now? It's too easy to find no MS answers for almost everything, even triple-A gaming is not the windows anchor it's been since they ran that doom demo
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

gfody 11mo ago

microsofts own stuff never seems to be what gets momentum. there's a strong aftermarket for better ways like back in the borland era bcb and delphi, the more things change the more they stay the same!

layer8 11mo ago

Generally speaking, I wouldn’t take what Microsoft uses as guidance nowadays, given a lot of the software they produce. (This is not an endorsement of MAUI.)

vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago

That has been a problem since forever. Microsoft themselves rarely used the tools they gave to developers. SourceSafe, MFC, WPF and the .NET frameworks that followed were only for 3rd party devs. And when they used these tools, the software usually got worse. One example was Visual Studio. 2008 was really nice with great customization and good performance. Then they wrote 2010 with MFC and it was slow and lost tons of features. I think it’s better on the server side with ASP.NET. As far as I have heard MAUI is pretty buggy and has lost momentum. It will probably go on the long list of basically abandoned .NET UI frameworks

okanat 11mo ago
You are mixing your UI frameworks and versions. VS 2010 is written in WPF. WPF is / was Windows Vista's and 7's UX. Old Control Panel in Win 10/11 still is WPF. All the wizards like ClearType wizard is WPF. MFC is much older (1992). Unfortunately Microsoft likes to jump into bandwagons and many engineers at the company seem to like to reinvent stuff rather than adopt. WPF, WinUI2 and WinUI3 all share the same Xaml based structure. So they could have adopted WPF. It is not that Microsoft doesn't develop advanced UIs with their frameworks. WPF is still well-used by Windows and other Microsoft utilities like Windows Terminal. They are just stupidly abandoning their built up bases for silly industry fads. They jumped into tablet / touchscreen / hybrid-mobile-desktop bandwagon in late-2010s and tried to force WinUI as an UWP-only feature. It resulted in low adoption. They didn't adopt WPF to have same theming. When WinUI2 failed, they tried to make modern C++ a reality and tried to remove UWP restrictions which is a good decision. However they diverted quite a bit resources into AI slop generation now and WinUI3 just languishes. Same for MAUI. They tried to get into multi-platform, multi-device framework as a way to generate leads into Microsoft ecosystem. They try to use various frameworks and UI stuff to get people hooked into the ecosystem and find ways to upgrade them into Azure and M365 customers. It is meaningless and tiring. All of those could be only WPF. It is like Google and its many Bazel-like build systems (but not full Bazel) for each of Chrome, Fuschia and Android.
- vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
  Oh yes. I mistyped. 2010 was written in WPF
- sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
  Everything you say is using WPF is not actually using WPF, other than Visual Studio.

latentsea 11mo ago

Never build a frontend on a .NET technology. Period. They always end up unsupported in the end. Just use standard web technologies and thank yourself later. I've been a .NET dev for a decade now and that's what I've learnt.

password4321 11mo ago
Except WinForms, spectacular for Windows-only utility GUIs.
- glzone1 11mo ago
  No kidding - kind of wild that winforms is still kind of a gold standard experience today! I actually liked VB Forms - lots of easy rapid application development was possible.
  - issafram 11mo ago
    WPF as well
    - memsom 11mo ago
      I like WPF and I code with it regularly, but the drag and drop UI builder was the worst aspect of WPF and generated terrible Xaml that was almost impossible to maintain.
  - memsom 11mo ago
    Delphi was the best RAD tool though. It was native code, not a weird interpreted or jitted app. It could also build to a single exe file. VB struggled with an unwieldy engine for most of its life.
- fuzzzerd 11mo ago
  > spectacular Not exactly the word I'd use, since it really hasn't changed since VB4, but it's definitely reliable and stable.

Kyrio 11mo ago

These days, I think Microsoft's web-based desktop apps mostly use WebView2 directly instead of Electron, so they don't have to bundle a browser. I think for Teams it happened at the same time that they moved from Angular to React. The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET. Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.

weq 11mo ago
Ive been building these apps (cross platform web based ui, C# backend) for years, and yes its finally good to see MS catch up and validate the architecture ive pushed since Xamarin. I wrote once wrote an electron version of this archand thought wtf are people doing? Things can be so much easier when you use a platform that knows how to multi-thread. At stages i had to build adapters/upstream patches for Chromeiunium directly onto Mac and Linux, and its was a major pain having to debug C calls. Ive been using the same framework now for 10+yrs on apps in the stores, i wrote a small layer infront of the webviews and can swap out webkit, chrome, edge on demand. You really dont need much, just a constand way to boostrap logic and UI. 90% of code is shared across all platforms, there are def differences in WebView engines that you sometimes come across but those parts just get swapped out with browser specific JS. Ive found bugs and worked with browser teams at all vendors doing this and to see how simple this is with Dotnet these days compared to when i started is refreshing. Its easily the most stable cross-platform framework around, if you are stuck using something like flutter i pitty you, its just eletron with another skin. I can swap out and integrate directly with OS libs when i need to do stuff that the dotnet team hasnt gotten around to yet without re-writing. This has mean i really havnt used MAUI at all, but if i need to or could take advantage of it i can mix it on an Ui element by element basis. I prefer webUIs though, i have the chose to handle anything with either JS, WASM, or a combination. I can use traditional JS frameworks or traditional Native UI frameworks. If i had started this process later, avalonia seemed to have the closest thing i required. It was just a bit a more complex /based on WinUI (which i dont really enjoy) but it supported all platforms and gave lower level api access. MS were smart, that canabalanised all these community effort and brought them into the fold. Every dotnet webview impl was a successfull community driven project before. They didnt write anything themselves from scratch.

mdasen 11mo ago

> Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI Microsoft Teams was released in March 2017. .NET MAUI was released in May 2022. In 2021, Microsoft replaced Angular with React and moved away from Electron to WebView2 (using the OS' built-in renderer rather than a bundled Chromium). So even the rewrite was a year before MAUI (and they probably started the rewrite before 2021). Plus, part of the point of using React there was that they could basically replace Angular bit by bit. Microsoft Teams is just older than MAUI. It's like asking why Hadoop is written in Java and not Go or Rust or why Kafka is written in Scala and not Kotlin. Kafka was open sourced in January 2011 and Kotlin came out in July 2011. Kotlin wasn't an option given that they were developing it years before the language was released. That's not to say that Microsoft's attitude toward MAUI doesn't leave concerns. There was some news a while back about a bunch of layoffs around MAUI. It's always concerning when there doesn't appear to be any dog-fooding going on - is this just some junk they're throwing at us that they don't want to use? I think some hesitation also comes from the Blazor side where it's looking like Microsoft doesn't really see Blazor as a React competitor so much as a way for internal company apps to be made quickly - in contrast to the Google IO presentations on WASM support for Dart/Flutter where they were emphasizing better-than-JS performance. That said, Microsoft hasn't really released a lot of new (green field) stuff over the past 2-3 years. What product should they have made in MAUI, but didn't? You can't say Teams because that was a giant product way before MAUI even existed. Most of what Microsoft is doing is work on existing products - things they released before 2023/2024 and were in development before MAUI existed. Flutter had a 5 year head start on MAUI. But there certainly is a feeling that Microsoft doesn't feel committed to it or at least not enough to put its weight behind it.

tcoff91 11mo ago
Microsoft seems more committed to react native than MAUI.
debugnik 11mo ago
Teams is not older than MAUI because MAUI was mostly a rebrand of Xamarin Forms.
- 11mo ago

georgemcbay 11mo ago

MAUI was horrible when I tried using it about a year ago, tons of bugs, pretty iffy comms/support from the MAUI team as to timelines when things might get fixed, etc. Eventually dumped it and moved to Kotlin Compose/Multiplatform, which is just so much better at achieving a similar goal (though, obviously, without being part of the .NET ecosystem).

DANmode 11mo ago

Why invest strongly in a desktop-first framework when society aren’t too sure about it? MAUI was to get them through to where everyone wants webapps - served from an Azure backend, of course.

oaiey 11mo ago

The answer to that is well known: Windows division builds WinUI/Win32 as their native C++/COM API, Office division went to React on their path to the web and the dev division fills gaps (WPF) and provides tools for external and internal devs (Maui for cross platform uis). It is history not the lack of will. At one point the windows division was in shambles (remember vista) and WPF pops up. At another point, the windows and dev division have no answers to the office group (because you know who uses non win tech) so they went react. And then external devs screamed: where is the .net cross platform story so Microsoft acquired xamarin and later form Maui out of it. It is history not lack of trust. But the outcome is the same: lackluster support for all UI toolkits.

dukeofharen 11mo ago
I understood (can not confirm it though) that the new start menu in Windows 11 was built using React Native, so yet another ui framework in the mix.
bonesss 11mo ago
Well summarized, and just as shocking today as it was every minute while it developed. Someone needs to remind those cats that they own the platform. Being able to sanely develop apps for and on that platform should be possible, and UI kinda-sorta matters for that. At a certain point with the MFC they had it dialled in, while pioneering asynchronous browser tech, with many best in class tools. Decades later with a cross-platform cloud-centric stack they have a shrug emoji as big and wide as the eyes can see, and no sense this basic question of development will ever get improved. Ballmer chanting ‘developers, developers, developers …’ springs to mind.
- skeeter2020 11mo ago
  Ballmer was not my favourite person to run MS, but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in. Early Nadella days too. Now? It's too easy to find no MS answers for almost everything, even triple-A gaming is not the windows anchor it's been since they ran that doom demo

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]