SkiaSharp VS Microsoft.Maui.Graphics

It looks like the port was compiled with a binary SkiaSharp [0] since that requires Google tooling to build. Interesting to see the committer allowing this. Apparently it is not the first time.

0. https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp

The library that I've had the best luck with is SkiaSharp with .net 3.1. That said, I agree with others that I'd update the version of .net if possible.

Found this issue that basically say it's not supported in skia directly, and it's right, from this page it seems only supported on iOS/Mac. This is pretty frustrating considering the documentation of SkiaSharp Encode() doesn't mention it.

Yes, I'm not aware of any way to use either the canvas api or webgl directly. This project has bindings for the canvas API, but it hasn't been updated in two years:https://github.com/BlazorExtensions/Canvas. SkiaSharp seems a nice option too: https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp. It supports graphics across a whole load of platforms, including Blazor on the web.

If you want pure .NET, cross-platform, and future compatibility, SkiaSharp is the new way to do it.

This seems to be a clash with skiasharp. The other package I have which uses skiasharp is Mapsui Possibly related to this issue with SkiSharp mono/SkiaSharp#1879

This is interesting since SkiaSharp says:

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).