Feliz VS Microsoft.Maui.Graphics

NOTE: You can try this with the Feliz codebase, which is larger and has multiple .fsproj files. But as you will find out, the project structure is laid out just like we've seen here.

Feliz to create react apps, the most mature option.

The Feliz DSL https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/Feliz/ looks fairly similar to Reagent or there's Fable.Lit https://fable.io/Fable.Lit/ which is more like jsx in that you write the html directly, adding active components via interpolated string mechanisms. There is a VS Code add in that gives you html+css syntax highlighting and auto complete inside your F# files.

Feliz is a DSL for React, and paired with Vite give a hot reload experience that's close to the same as JS/TS, even the React dev tools work fine. Nobody has a ready to go package/template up right now but there's little stopping you from creating a NextJS app.

It means it's similar to the Feliz DSL used to build React web apps: https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/Feliz/

Feliz

I'm curious to see how this goes, F# seems to excel at these type of DSL's (e.g. Feliz, a react DSL is a joy), a big part thanks to type inference and list comprehensions which are a game changer for that pesky conditional rendering.

if you've ever used Feliz or Avalonia.FuncUI then this DSL will make you feel at home, it's less verbose than the original DSL and gives you basically the same benefits, in the case of Fun.Blazor is slightly less performant but it is a viable alternative

Along with Fable highly recommend a look at Feliz. A joy to work with and its ViewEngine can also be separately used w/ Giraffe if you enjoy the syntax:

https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/Feliz/

https://github.com/Zaid-Ajaj/Feliz

Microsoft.Maui.Graphics (which relies on Skia anyway but whatever)

I'm not sure if this is out of scope for https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics, but that seems to be the designated successor to the platform-specific graphics libs.

Yea, they can keep using the old versions, but that locks them out of the new versions and breaks expectations, especially since they were a member of the .NET Foundation. So it's up to them to keep using a version that won't get fixes or new features or accept the new license.

This whole thing just points out how hard all of this is to get right. I understand both sides. But I do at least get the feeling that the ImageSharp team is a bit high strung.

https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics/issues/47

I think this is probably an intentional move to move away from Microsoft and the .NET Foundation in addition to trying to capitalize on people making a lot of money from the software package.

After having looked at the license, it seems reasonable enough to me aside from the technicalities others have brought up. The vvvv tool follows a similar license of, it's free unless you make money from it.

You can also write a MAUI app and then use https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.

This set of SkiaSharp views can be added to any .NET MAUI application for drawing. This is similar to what you can do with the built-in GraphicsView and Microsoft.Maui.Graphics, but directly to SkiaSharp.

There's Microsoft.Maui.Graphics as well so that the renderer will not rely on native controls just like Avalonia and Flutter (but currently it's experimental). MAUI's flexible enough to enable that scenario, the bigger question is more on motivation from either MS or the community to make it happen.

For colors you have your choice of solid paint, linear and radial gradient paint, and more provided by Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.

This work is a pre-cursor to Blazor WebAssembly support coming in the Microsoft.MAUI.Graphics repo, giving us a single .Net API to draw on all platforms MAUI supports, along with Blazor.

In .NET 6, there will be Microsoft.Maui.Graphics (doesn't depend on Maui, despite its name).