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

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.

CoreWCF might be of some use.

You can open a discussion in the CoreWCF repo:

In the later versions you could avoid almost all the XML mess by configuring all of the settings in code. The experience is pretty close to gRPC imo, one plus point is you don't need to learn how to write proto classes. Though you could use protobuf-net for a similar experience. I'm kinda hopeful with CoreWCF, they aim to support more transports (including event gRPC) in the future along with queues other than MSMQ and slowly evolve from being too SOAP specific. There's a lot of potential still for WCF to be a transport agnostic framework that ecompass a lot of transports.

On our end, it's WCF for some servers that haven't been upgraded over. Though it seems we have a path forward for that now with CoreWCF that we're working towards.

There's ongoing work on adding generic queue support. The first two concrete implementations should be MSMQ and RabbitMq from what I recall, though MSMQ will be windows only. But the nice thing about the work is it also opens up other types of message queues for WCF (e.g. Azure Service Bus, RabbitMq, Amazon SQS etc...).

It's seems there's already design work started for a generic queue concept here. I'm pretty interested to see how it goes as well as that'll be a big part for CoreWcf to move forward as a viable choice for greenfield projects and not just a way to migrate existing Wcf projects to Core.

The ongoing .net core port called CoreWcf plans to realize that goal as a future feature on it's roadmap. Where there's plans on adding new transports that didn't exist on .net framework wcf like Grpc, Azure Service bus, Amazon SQS, rabbitmq etc...

If you hit any difficulties or have any problems, feel free to jump on the gitter channel. Details for that are in the repo contributing guide.