Ask HN: Are you using .NET writing cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

• Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

  273 21,556 9.9 C#

  .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

  

Microsoft stopped development (more or less) around May 2020 to focus on MAUI, which was released in November 2020.

Actually it wasn’t - MAUI wasn’t released until May 2022, tooling was just released July 2022 for Windows, and VS for Mac with proper support has yet to be released. If you’re used to command line that may not seem like a big deal, but the whole point of the .NET ecosystem is that you have a rich set of tools that saves time and enhances developer productivity.

So as for why Xamarin wasn’t discussed for the last few years, it’s probably because Microsoft put it in a coma for 2 years.

I was hoping MAUI would fix a lot of the quality issues, but like any big rewrite, it seems to have traded one set of problems for another. The developer experience is better, but there are lots of bugs in basic functionality that make it difficult to use. https://github.com/dotnet/maui/labels/t%2Fbug I don’t think Microsoft has enough engineers assigned to this project to make it successful.

If you don’t care about the quality of your app (e.g. your a corporate form developer and don’t care about your users) MAUI is a great choice. But if you don’t care about the UX, web technologies are almost certainly a better choice.

As for native desktop, you’d have to be really stupid to choose WinUI or UWP, unless the point of the app is to be a WinUI or UWP demo. WPF is fine, but then why on earth would you choose that over electron or WebView2, which solves some of the resource problems from pure electron.

All of this is coming from someone whose entire career is built on .NET client technology… I was really hoping (and still hope) for a turnaround. I bet big on Xamarin being the right approach; I still think it is, but Microsoft really dropped the ball since the acquisition.

• mobile

  158 5,622 9.5 C#

  The mobile app vault (iOS and Android). (by bitwarden)

  

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Avalonia

  254 23,749 9.9 C#

  Develop Desktop, Embedded, Mobile and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. The most popular .NET UI client technology

  

For cross platform framework. I would recommend Avalonia https://avaloniaui.net/

• Flutter

  1,203 161,805 10.0 Dart

  Flutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond

  

You could try google's flutter: https://flutter.dev/ for cross platform. I'm currently building a sample app and seems to target and work decently well across the biggest platforms - web, mac, win, linux, ios, android.

• PublicDocs

  6 182 5.0

  Contains documents and articles that may be publicly useful.

Quick comparision I just found: https://github.com/robloo/PublicDocs/blob/master/XAMLFramewo...

• Camelot

  17 482 6.7 C#

  Camelot is cross-platform file manager written in C# (by IngvarX)

Suggest a related project