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

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.

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.)