Blazorise VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

I made a Blazor component library for one of my personal projects that failed, but the component library lived on as an open-source project called Blazorise [1].

In late 2019, I got a well-paid job in a large local company because of the project reference. Unfortunately, COVID happened, and I lost that same job after a few months. So again, because of Blazorise, I got several other gigs as a freelancer.

But after a while, it was hard to do all the work on the projects and do freelance jobs at the same time. Not to mention that family time was also very limited.

So I decided to commercially license Blazorise to companies, and keep it free for individuals. Hopefully, the decision paid off. Today I run a small company and continue to work on Blazorise full time. We're still fully bootstraped without any external funds.

[1] https://blazorise.com/

https://blazorise.com is fully done on Blazor. Also the support forum https://blazorise.com/support

Da, vidi https://blazorise.com/

I am working on form that run dynamic sql query in database and populates the results in datagrid. I don't know how many columns will return by the query. So I populate my resuts in DataTable, but unable to display on datagrid. Relevant issue [Feature] Full featured work with DataTable in DataGrid · Issue #701 · Megabit/Blazorise (github.com) . Does anyone know workaround for this.

Making Blazor run on Linux was a lot of hard work. Mainly because there is no official support from Microsoft (but even that doesn't always help, as you will see in the next section about macOS). I tried to make it work with 3 different community driven projects: Electron.NET, Chromely and Photino. Electron is very bloated and very slow - it takes for ever to start debugging from Visual Studio. I also hated that it first opens a console window and then the Blazor window. I don't want to see 2 windows open. Chromely also first opens a console window and then the Blazor window. I couldn't make it work in Linux. That leaves Photino. It comes with a Blazor sample that works in Linux without a problem. But my project didn't work in Linux with Photino. I found out that the problem was loading content for https://github.com/Megabit/Blazorise from the \wwwroot\_content folder. I sumbitted a GitHub issue and the problem was fixed in Photino.Blazor v2.5.0

I did something similar with Blazorise, a personal project of mine, https://blazorise.com/. It started as a hobby project. After some time it grew too large that it took most of my time, not to mention the time I could spend with my wife and son. Things changed during the Covid when I was laid off. Then I started freelancing for a while, and last year I finally took a big step and went full-time with Blazorise. Switched to dual licensing, where larger enterprises must purchase a commercial license. It is working, and hopefully, it will continue to work. Or otherwise, my wife will rage on me :/

My guess is that they're using component libraries (like Blazorise) rather than write components themselves.

I am migrating XF app into MAUI and writing a simple Navigation framework because Prism doesn't work well and I didn't use anything advanced anyway. So, I am surfing the code of MAUI to intercept all the back buttons, etc. I haven't found a single mention of apis related to predictive back "RegisterOnBackInvokedCallback", "OnBackInvokedDispatcher", "OnBackPressedDispatcher", "AddCallback", "android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback" Also I don't see any issue on github that would say "Support Android Predictive back". Only one kinda related https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8680

Below issue is still reproducing in Maui .net7.0 version also. #10163

Maui is Open Source, MIT License

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...

To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...

If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.

There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

First I came across this Github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/9687 - According to this issue, this is a known bug for MAUI iOS, but it works OK for MAUI Android. As I said, I target Android only and I have the exact same issue. It's apparantly fixed with some of the latest versions for MAUI but the problem still occurs to me even with MAUI version:

I saw this and tried to imitate (ofc my lack of experience wouldn't allow me to do it in the exact way). Already found some documentation that allowed to understand better. Thanks for the insigh.

I implemented the Auth controller following this sample code from Microsoft.