GraphicsControls VS Comet

If you need this scenario, you can take a look at Maui.Graphics.Controls, and see if that fits your needs, right it's an experimental idea.

And as Microsoft mentioned in the podcast, there are also implementations that use drawn controls, but those are not the standard ones and must be specifically downloaded separately by the developer. For example, https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls - " a .NET MAUI experiment that offers cross-platform, pixel-perfect, drawn controls"

To note, Maui does theoretically allow pixel perfect rendering with it's renderer architecture. An experiment called Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls does that through Maui.Graphics and can be a possible solution for targeting Linux. Though yeah it's an experiment overall than sometimes supported at the moment.

If however you're looking for custom controls, i've found very little describing how to go around making your own custom control. There is one repo on github made by one of the team: https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls

Linux is experimentally supported if you use Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls

The MS team have an experiment for Maui drawn controls: https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls I'm kind of hoping it becomes a full blown Maui feature at some point down the line 😁

Yes. Maui.Control.Graphics is a feature in that lets you create your UI pixel-perfect across platform. They even let you choose the design language to use (Material, Cupertino, and Fluent). Right now the controls are still few and very limited, not to mention that this feature is still experimental. They are also drawn using the platforms rendering API (explanation here)

It looks really cool tbh, seen a couple of videos. You can check it out here if you're interested: https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls

It doesn't support web. The most promising components at the moment to make this happen are: - https://github.com/dotnet/GraphicsControls . First they will need to get this working with normal platforms. - https://github.com/dotnet/Microsoft.Maui.Graphics . A dependency of the above library. Web code exists here but is not yet functional. - Blazor. In order to deploy usable Blazor wasm apps they need to get AOT support working: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/5466 (Note the blazor you read about that is connected with MAUI is just another style of writing MAUI apps and doesn't allow MAUI apps to run on the web.)

> the first, MVP-style, attempt will be using Electron.

Good choice.

If you want to stick to HTML...WebView2 is suppose to replace it, but it assumes your backend code is .NET or C++, instead of JS/Node.js. Microsoft Teams is using it.

If you want to use native Windows UI components from JS code, then React Native for Windows is recommended. Facebook Messenger is using it.

All approaches require C# or C++ modules to be used to interact with the Windows Platform. Or there is: https://github.com/tjanczuk/edge.

The recommended approach is WinUI 3 which would involve C#/C++ and XAML.

To SwiftUI/React/JetPack are called module-view-update (MVU). There is an MVU for C# called Comet. https://github.com/dotnet/Comet#key-concepts

The benefit at least with the approach instead of embedding Avalonia inside Maui is you could potentially use non xaml frameworks for ui as long as they support Maui as a target. Stuff like Comet or Blazor mobile bindings would be possible aside from xaml. Especially if they're coming from Blazor web or code based ui frameworks like flutter which makes it appealing.

That was using the experimental Comet extension and lib, based on .NET MAUI. You can find instructions here: https://github.com/dotnet/Comet

There are also experimental libraries for .NET MAUI, which let's you create UI only with C#: Comet, MauiReactor

The MVU library is called Comet. The lead developer recently left Microsoft but im still seeing commits on the repo which is a good sign!

Yeah the hybrid blazor stuff is interesting. So is https://github.com/dotnet/Comet.

The XAML API is definitely more compact overall which is unfortunate, mostly because a lot of the devs prefer XAML. I've always preferred code-based UI though. Theres some 2ndish/3rd party options with Comet, which changes the UI pattern to MVU and C# Markup, which might not be updated for MAUI yet.

All the C# parts for Hybrid (including the components themselves) are running natively. Only the UI part (e.g. html, css) under the Web View is running web tech (html, css) under a native webview of the platform. But you can also add native MAUI controls if you wanted to (either via XAML, or Comet) and mix and match as that webview control that Blazor uses is just a MAUI control.

There is an alternative using MAUI .Net Comet