UWP Community Toolkit VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

GitHub/WCT/Controls/DataGrid (source code for the control)

Started programming by writing some apps for Windows Phone later UWP during university. A few years ago I started collaborating a lot on GitHub to some Microsoft projects, like the Windows Community Toolkit. There I created a lot of new APIs and libraries, like all the new animation APIs and pipeline brush APIs, etc. I then also proposed adding some general .NET APIs to it, and that's how the MVVM Toolkit was born, along with other libraries which are now moved to the .NET Community Toolkit. Fast forward until about late 2020, and they pinged me saying the new Microsoft Store (which hadn't been announced yet back then) was using several of those new APIs I had written, so we started collaborating more so that I could add more functionality they needed. After that shipped, at some point there was a new opening to which I applied, and here I am in the Microsoft Store team and also leading the .NET Community Toolkit 🙂

https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/WindowsCommunityToolkit (now multiplateform)

For instance, recently Chaochao opened a PR for the Windows Community Toolkit to open source the whole custom animation helpers he developed for the Store, which are used to implement the morphing animations you see when scrolling in a product page. You can see a GIF and the whole code here and in the linked PR.

Specifically I am looking for AsyncRelayCommand.cs. All documentation points to CommunityToolkit repo but I can not find it there. Link to source repo from the Nuget package also points to CommunityToolkit. I am not looking for samples.

The report itself is just markdown that is rendered with the Community Toolkit's MarkdownTextBlock.

That's interesting. It will need some documentation and to finish the renaming at some point, e.g. Span2D is in https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/WindowsCommunityToolkit but as you say doesn't require Windows.

Windows Community Toolkit

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.