GraphicsControls VS Microsoft.Maui.Graphics

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.)

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).