Microsoft.Maui.Graphics VS Avalonia.FuncUI

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).

For those interested in .NET languages with alternative compilation targets, Elmish (https://elmish.github.io/elmish/) is pretty unique.

We use F# on the front end (instead of TS), and thanks to the Fable compiler (which transpiles F# to JS, Python, Dart, PHP and Rust), most of the benefits of an Elm-style model in the UI can be ported to all sorts of different outputs languages. The rust target is in beta, but its promising because the WASM bundle size stands to be dramatically lower.

While the default is reactivity library for Elmish is React, you can swap in Avalonia/FuncUI (https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI) pretty easily as well.

The code to declare/build the widgets is quite nice. Modifying widgets by hand on certain signals or manually re-wiring all the signals seems a bit outdated to me.

Wonder if something like FuncUI [1] could be built on top of it.

[1] https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

OTOH, if desktop really is the primary focus, and if you can drop the idea of reusable UI code, then Avalonia is a great choice for F# as you can use a Avalonia.FuncUI and/or Elmish.Avalonia.

And one more MVU for you https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

You might want to check out Avalonia.FuncUI, which lets you use F# and the cross-platform Avalonia framework to build desktop applications with an Elm-like architecture: https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI#example-using-...