Fusion VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

- Even frequent exchanges like, “Hey, I’m heading to Costco, need anything?” where the follow-up is easier spoken than typed, or may require a brief brainstorming - “Oh, remember our neighbors are visiting us on Sunday?”

That’s how 8 years later (2 years ago) me and my co-founder decided to implement a new chat app.

— Technology —

To make it short, I’ll post just one point here: Actual Chat is based on Fusion (https://github.com/servicetitan/Stl.Fusion) - think MobX / computed observables, but distributed. In Actual Chat, the state it manages spans from our servers to every client app, creating an eventually consistent “state mesh”. The unified state management, where clients and servers use exactly the same abstraction to “observe” the changes happening to any bit of content, is quite a challenge from the technology standpoint. IMO it alone deserves a brief look.

P.S. Thank you for reading up to this point!

P.S. The app is created with Fusion, which is another cool thing for Blazor: https://github.com/servicetitan/Stl.Fusion

So there are different ways how you can do this, there are multiple different protocols for Unity, for example. There is also this more generic state replication framework.

There is this lib: https://github.com/servicetitan/Stl.Fusion

The library benchmarked in the article is Stl.Fusion: https://github.com/servicetitan/Stl.Fusion. I've only learned about it today, and the documentation is a bit messy, but that seems to be a really interesting project. The author describes it as a .Net library to quickly develop efficient, distributed, real-time web applications.

Disagree with every "no" here :) The answer is yes, but you need a fairly fancy "extra": https://github.com/servicetitan/Stl.Fusion/

I am migrating XF app into MAUI and writing a simple Navigation framework because Prism doesn't work well and I didn't use anything advanced anyway. So, I am surfing the code of MAUI to intercept all the back buttons, etc. I haven't found a single mention of apis related to predictive back "RegisterOnBackInvokedCallback", "OnBackInvokedDispatcher", "OnBackPressedDispatcher", "AddCallback", "android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback" Also I don't see any issue on github that would say "Support Android Predictive back". Only one kinda related https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8680

Below issue is still reproducing in Maui .net7.0 version also. #10163

Maui is Open Source, MIT License

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

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)

While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...

To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...

If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.

There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

First I came across this Github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/9687 - According to this issue, this is a known bug for MAUI iOS, but it works OK for MAUI Android. As I said, I target Android only and I have the exact same issue. It's apparantly fixed with some of the latest versions for MAUI but the problem still occurs to me even with MAUI version:

I saw this and tried to imitate (ofc my lack of experience wouldn't allow me to do it in the exact way). Already found some documentation that allowed to understand better. Thanks for the insigh.

I implemented the Auth controller following this sample code from Microsoft.