MobileBlazorBindings VS CSharpForMarkup

It's difficult to imagine. But if the rumour has any merit, perhaps it simply means that there will be a push to consolidate on some blazor tech using stuff like https://github.com/dotnet/MobileBlazorBindings

There's Blazor Mobile Bindings but it's essentially experimental at the moment and isn't exactly active. From playing around with it though, it is pretty neat as you get the Blazor programming model but with native controls.

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.

This is one reason I'd really love for them to push through on making alternatives to XAML like Blazor mobile bindings.

I'd say Blazor mobile bindings is also pretty interesting imo, unlike Hybrid it doesn't use Html and uses MAUI controls directly but still keeps the Blazor programming style and still uses razor to tie in C# and components.

Oleksandr has been contributing to the official experiment project, and singlehandedly updated it to support .NET MAUI. He even now has documentation on his fork.

I really hope Blazor Mobile Bindings takes off imo. I still care for native controls and if Mobile bindings does become a valid target, then you'll have an alternative to XAML when writing native components but using Razor syntax (which imo is less verbose). It'll be like how React does it (which is still pretty popular) where you have React web and also React Native which uses the platform's native controls underneath. Both aren't exactly the same but since the framework is similar (React, Blazor) it should be easy to swap between the two.

Yeah I really hope they'll productize Blazor Mobile Bindings (currently experimental), it's essentially using Xaml controls via Razor as the markup format instead and can use C# expressions (so less need for converters).

For example, in Android there's this file: https://github.com/dotnet/MobileBlazorBindings/blob/main/templates/BlazorHybrid-app/NewApp.Android/wwwroot/index.html

It means you can use Blazor's syntax to write MAUI apps, as an alternative to XML-like XAML syntax.

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

Uno Platform can be both XAML or C# Markup if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it.

And if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it, you can have an all-around C# approach for both front end and back end.

Maybe some c# markup libraries like this one. But I haven't use that so you'd need to check yourself

You can CSharpForMarkup with WPF, WinUI 3, Uno Platform. with AvaloniaUI and Maui coming and possibly Blazor.

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

To manage mental mapping of what is being drawn, I keep methods that create widget trees short. My rule of thumb is that whole method has to comfortably fit the screen at once. For each section of the main tree I create a static function that returns a branch of the tree. These functions have descriptive names that help you visualize what element each function builds. If a tree inside a function is long, it is broken down in the same way.

There are some fluent extensions (for Xamarin.Forms and probably future MAUI) that help you build UI in declarative fashion with C#. Same extensions could be created for other frameworks.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/c-sharp-markup-for-xa...

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

For reusable custom widgets that can't be done with a static function, I create new classes with their own widget trees. Try to keep widgets composable and avoid inheritance if possible.

Hot reload is coming in .NET 6, so waiting for rebuild will soon be history.

I have no experience with QML so I can't really comment on that.

If I were to build a windows only desktop app with technology I was moderately familiar with, I'd probably got for WPF + https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup Working without XAML makes life so much simpler.