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

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.

I wish that was true, but even the new stuff, like their new frameworks, performs poorly while their older frameworks perform really well. That's brand new code, with no legacy codebase to care for.

The reason why I don't recommend Winui is the million bugs it has. See the github issues page. All Microsoft ui stuff sucks currently. But if you use WPF why not FluentWPF

Development for WinAppSdk and WinUI 3 is also very slow and Microsoft seems to not want to push it and invest more developers into it for some reason. They try to improve the framework, is just it's a small team. For example it was a headacke to apply the Mica backgrop and required unmanaged code, they made it simpler and reduced it to a line of code but it took months. I have 2 out of 7 issues fixed on WinAppSdk repository and 0 out of 8 issues fixed in the WinUI 3 repository (some of the older than a year). This are just my issues, there are many other opened by other developers. So yeah, it wasn't fun at all. PoweshellSDK had an issue with the Import-Module command and it wasn't fixed for more than a year and probably won't be ever fixed, but I'm glad I found a workaround, even more clean and more safe, otherwise I couldn't have added the posibility to uninstall and change Store apps.

Compared to UWP or WPF, WinUI 3 is somewhere between 100-200% slower and consumes 7-20 times as much RAM as the old frameworks (for certain operations).