GraphicsControls VS ProjectReunion

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 issue is described here: WebView2 does not support passing in a CoreWebView2Environment · Issue #1170 · microsoft/WindowsAppSDK (github.com)

.. and how many of the Microsoft applications actually use WinUI3? As far as I can tell they're doing their own thing (Office) or are Electron (Teams) or, at least in Windows 10, haven't actually been updated from WinForms.

The overhead of WinUI3 is pretty huge. The visual designer, a winning feature of Visual Studio for decades, is AWOL. Why? It's XAML, the same as the previous XAML designer! It's just .. broken?

The backward compatibility story is a disaster: you can get stuck in the UWP sandbox https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/1780

What's the big Microsoft WinUI3 flagship app, then? Something people are actually using? Rather than just a few system dialogues. (How many Win11 settings pop up a Win32 dialogue box, still?)

Development for WinAppSdk and WinUI 3 is also very slow and Microsoft seems to not want to push it and invest more developers into it for some reason. They try to improve the framework, is just it's a small team. For example it was a headacke to apply the Mica backgrop and required unmanaged code, they made it simpler and reduced it to a line of code but it took months. I have 2 out of 7 issues fixed on WinAppSdk repository and 0 out of 8 issues fixed in the WinUI 3 repository (some of the older than a year). This are just my issues, there are many other opened by other developers. So yeah, it wasn't fun at all. PoweshellSDK had an issue with the Import-Module command and it wasn't fixed for more than a year and probably won't be ever fixed, but I'm glad I found a workaround, even more clean and more safe, otherwise I couldn't have added the posibility to uninstall and change Store apps.

As far as I know, there are still some issues with OIDC integration. See this, for example.

this I'm interested in. WinAppSDK is open source.

I think the issue is actually the sandboxing and other stuff. WinRT StorageProvider API is known to be extremely slow and NTFS / Windows IO subsystem is itself already quite slow compared to UNIX. The issue IIRC is that StorageProvider is designed for sandboxing and the way they implemented that involves doing RPCs to other processes. So there's probably some heavy context switching involved, but it's architectural, and so the voice recorder was never fixed.

https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/8

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. I even work on WindowsAppSDK just not the WinUI parts. People far more graphically inclined and talented than I handle that 😀