My kingdom for a UI toolkit that can be used to make real CAD programs, and not yet-more things that just look like webviews and could just be a webpage.

Avalonia is also working towards using the new Flutter rendering backend Impeller which is being used to replace Skia, which is used by Chrome for rendering, turtles all the way down:

https://avaloniaui.net/blog/avalonia-partners-with-google-s-...

Too little, too late. Desktop apps are mostly dead.

MAUI has felt like a barebones project for years. Forgive me if I don't believe this is the beginning of more robust support.

This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web!

One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything larger.

These all may seem pedantic, but they contribute to the feeling "this is not the real web."

This is the same problem with Java applets in the late '90s, Flash and Silverlight in the early 2000s. They are islands of richness within a web page, but those islands are, well, opaque to browsers, search engines, and virtually all web tooling.

Is there anything we can do to stop it? Or will it come anyway?

Three apprecitions:

1) In today's American political climate I think it's appropriate to express appreciation for immigrants to like Miguel de Icaza who dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into cross platform .NET and is the godfather of .NET Maui

2) As someone who came up developing desktop apps for Windows and Mac, I never liked developing web applications. There was so much lacking, but now developing web apps is becoming like developing desktop apps. Now you get/put your data from HTTP calls instead of file system and database calls or with Blazor and SignalR you don't even have to think about those. This may seem obvious to younger programmers today, but it would have seemed like magic back in 2004 when Dymanic HTML and Ajax (both Microsoft) were being invented.

3) I'm grateful Microsoft has changed their old ways to be a forward thinking company. They still have problems that any GIANT, Inc. organization has, but let's not forget how far they've come.

> We are collaborating with the Flutter team at Google to bring Impeller, their GPU first renderer, to .NET. That work is already in progress and as it lands, the MAUI backend will inherit those gains.

Interesting, I wonder how good Impeller is and if it's actually better than the new Graphite backend of Skia.

    Predictable performance: Impeller compiles all shaders and reflection offline at build time. It builds all pipeline state objects upfront. The engine controls caching and caches explicitly.

    Flutter’s Impeller renderer outperformed Skia. Impeller eliminates runtime shader compilation stalls, delivering lower frame times and more stable performance. For animation-heavy, graphics-rich apps, enabling Impeller significantly reduces jank and provides a smoother user experience.

In case anyone is confused

> Using .NET MAUI, you can develop apps that can run on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows from a single shared code-base.

This new development adds Linux and Browser to that list.

I recently tried out .NET MAUI to see how easy it was to build a hello world app. It was quite messy getting it setup on Mac but eventually I got a simple hello world app working. Nice to use XAML again after all these years. I always liked it.

Not to be confused with the MauiKit[0], the cross platform UI toolkit that had the name first[1]

[0] https://mauikit.org/ [1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35

I don't know if it has since improved, but .NET MAUI was really, really rough when I created a mobile app for my employer last year. I'm talking basic things - changing basic colors on the toolbar (1), putting non-text content inside a button (2), basic trigger behavior (3), to list a few. Not to mention that .NET UI has been years behind on hot-reload and developer tooling. Additionally, It was a fight to keep our app performant. The XAML compiler is a step in the right direction, but we had relatively simple views (in the dozens of components) absolutely tanking our FPS. I know there is probably some of my skill issue in there, but when I find basic things taking hours to optimize that I wouldn't even think about in React, I start to wonder about the framework. I spent a lot of time creating PRs on .NET MAUI but their team appears quite small and overloaded. I wish them the best - they're some talented folks, but I don't envy their job.

I can't help but think of Joel Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do (5) - the transition from Xamarin to .NET MAUI feels like a very similar mistake to Netscape. All of the battle tested Xamarin code, documentation, community examples, packages, etc. is now dead and has to be converted over to .NET MAUI.

On top of that, XAML just doesn't do it for me - having to deal with code-behind, MVVM view models, custom converters, and the actual XAML files themselves is insane for what is usually just a a single file in JS. The fact that you need to write a "InvertedBoolConverter" (4) just to flip a boolean is the most Microsoft thing ever. MAUI feels like it's designed just to keep a large development team busy. I'm not joking, we have a 42 line file that's only purpose is to flip booleans for XAML views.

We're a C# shop so it was nice to share our common C# with our desktop application, but I don't think it was worth it in the end. Sure JS has its problems, but I'll take those problems any day over MAUI.

I hope Avalonia can fix .NET MAUI - it'd be a massive kudos to them if they can smooth it over, but I can't say I'd willingly rely on this project long term.

1 - https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pull/15612 2 - https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8191 3 - https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pull/15655 4 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/communitytoolkit/ma... 5 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pull/16965

In the .NET ecosystem, I have noticed people to shame .NET MAUI because Microsoft themselves don't use this framework - Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI.

Why build a product on MAUI when Microsoft aren't too sure about it.

Took more than a minute to load on my macbook. Ouch!

I really love C# and the .net ecosystem, but they just haven't made it work for web.

A toolkit announcing “Linux support” is pretty ambiguous. Does it mean Xorg support? Wayland support? Framebuffer support? The announcement provides no clue about this.

If React is what’s powering the start menu now, I’m more curious about why Maui doesn’t power the start menu.

.NET Maui running on windows seems like a more logical first step to prove the organization buys their own dogfood.

Why does everything need to have a soulless mascot now? It’s offputting.

This is awesome… but: On the Web, is Avalonia using Skia to render inside a Skia Canvas?

**insert inception meme here**

Joking aside: this points to MSFT moving away from the whole Mono/Maui investments and into Aspire or whatever they call it. Without MSFT backing this I am not sure if there is much more future left for MAUI (or dotnet on mobile in general).

Avalonia is great though.

Ok, finally catching up to Kotlin Multiplatform Compose.