MobileBlazorBindings VS GraphicsControls

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.

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.)