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.
That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web.
This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion.
But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.
Not using the standard web stuff usually means it's also an accessibility nightmare, tried using a screen reader on the demo and it doesn't work at all unfortunately
MAUI was never intended for the web. This is not what Microsoft wants you to use it for.
WASM is just one of the platforms that Avalonia supports and so, if you run MAUI on Avalonia, you can run it on WASM.
If you do that though, it is going to be like rendering any other desktop GUI toolkit in WASM. It is not a web app. I mean, it is cool you can do it and MAUI in WASM is better than no web capability at all I guess. But you would never set out to create a web app in MAUI.
MAUI on Avalonia on WASM is really a modern replacement for Silverlight. And it will likely be about as popular.
The really cool thing is being able to target the Linux desktop finally. A lot of people will love that.
And, while MAUI was meant to use native controls on each platform, many people may prefer the Avalonia approach of having your app render the same everywhere.
I think it's the same problem that flutter web has, and probably any other canvas/wasm based backend? Those features still need to be implemented, while still missing out on accessibility?
>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.
That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps.
If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.
1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet.
I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).
Yeah. I think you need to render to actual DOM nodes when targeting the web if you want a first class experience.
We're betting on this over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus where we're building a cross-platform UI solution that enables you to do this by having a web-centric API (we are developing our own custom HTML/CSS renderer for native platforms).
I get the value in this and realize it's not for your polished -$500 ARPU consumer social apps, but man this is weird.
(Also if anyone who worked on it is here, it's crashing for me on OSX 26, Chrome 142.0.7444.135, if I run an animation and hit back as the animation finishes)
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.
The answer to that is well known: Windows division builds WinUI/Win32 as their native C++/COM API, Office division went to React on their path to the web and the dev division fills gaps (WPF) and provides tools for external and internal devs (Maui for cross platform uis).
It is history not the lack of will. At one point the windows division was in shambles (remember vista) and WPF pops up. At another point, the windows and dev division have no answers to the office group (because you know who uses non win tech) so they went react. And then external devs screamed: where is the .net cross platform story so Microsoft acquired xamarin and later form Maui out of it.
It is history not lack of trust. But the outcome is the same: lackluster support for all UI toolkits.
These days, I think Microsoft's web-based desktop apps mostly use WebView2 directly instead of Electron, so they don't have to bundle a browser. I think for Teams it happened at the same time that they moved from Angular to React.
The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET.
Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.
> Microsoft Team is built on Electron and not MAUI
Microsoft Teams was released in March 2017. .NET MAUI was released in May 2022. In 2021, Microsoft replaced Angular with React and moved away from Electron to WebView2 (using the OS' built-in renderer rather than a bundled Chromium). So even the rewrite was a year before MAUI (and they probably started the rewrite before 2021). Plus, part of the point of using React there was that they could basically replace Angular bit by bit.
Microsoft Teams is just older than MAUI. It's like asking why Hadoop is written in Java and not Go or Rust or why Kafka is written in Scala and not Kotlin. Kafka was open sourced in January 2011 and Kotlin came out in July 2011. Kotlin wasn't an option given that they were developing it years before the language was released.
That's not to say that Microsoft's attitude toward MAUI doesn't leave concerns. There was some news a while back about a bunch of layoffs around MAUI. It's always concerning when there doesn't appear to be any dog-fooding going on - is this just some junk they're throwing at us that they don't want to use? I think some hesitation also comes from the Blazor side where it's looking like Microsoft doesn't really see Blazor as a React competitor so much as a way for internal company apps to be made quickly - in contrast to the Google IO presentations on WASM support for Dart/Flutter where they were emphasizing better-than-JS performance.
That said, Microsoft hasn't really released a lot of new (green field) stuff over the past 2-3 years. What product should they have made in MAUI, but didn't? You can't say Teams because that was a giant product way before MAUI even existed. Most of what Microsoft is doing is work on existing products - things they released before 2023/2024 and were in development before MAUI existed. Flutter had a 5 year head start on MAUI.
But there certainly is a feeling that Microsoft doesn't feel committed to it or at least not enough to put its weight behind it.
Never build a frontend on a .NET technology. Period. They always end up unsupported in the end. Just use standard web technologies and thank yourself later. I've been a .NET dev for a decade now and that's what I've learnt.
Generally speaking, I wouldn’t take what Microsoft uses as guidance nowadays, given a lot of the software they produce. (This is not an endorsement of MAUI.)
That has been a problem since forever. Microsoft themselves rarely used the tools they gave to developers. SourceSafe, MFC, WPF and the .NET frameworks that followed were only for 3rd party devs. And when they used these tools, the software usually got worse. One example was Visual Studio. 2008 was really nice with great customization and good performance. Then they wrote 2010 with MFC and it was slow and lost tons of features.
I think it’s better on the server side with ASP.NET.
As far as I have heard MAUI is pretty buggy and has lost momentum. It will probably go on the long list of basically abandoned .NET UI frameworks
MAUI was horrible when I tried using it about a year ago, tons of bugs, pretty iffy comms/support from the MAUI team as to timelines when things might get fixed, etc.
Eventually dumped it and moved to Kotlin Compose/Multiplatform, which is just so much better at achieving a similar goal (though, obviously, without being part of the .NET ecosystem).
microsofts own stuff never seems to be what gets momentum. there's a strong aftermarket for better ways like back in the borland era bcb and delphi, the more things change the more they stay the same!
> 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.
> 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.
or as described here [2]
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.
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.
This 100%. I hate the trend of UX/UI that got unleashed upon us in the last decade of the web. Everything is scaled up for touch interactions and has to have fancy animation and very "comfortable" spacing around elements.
I wish we can go back to UIs that focus on information density and usability. I love looking at Japanese websites because of this.
You can make CAD programs with any toolkit as long as you have a GPU surface to render your actual CAD output to. You can do anything with this toolkit from weather apps to video editors, map analysis, and PDF editors.
You can check out the Avalonia demo reel to see what you can already do with the .NET GUI stack that MAUI now uses on Linux and on the web: https://avaloniaui.net/showcase
Yes, that's my litmus test for GUI toolkits - is it suitable to develop Photoshop-like software? Or is it only good for yet another weather or todo apps?
You could look at Godot. Their own editor is made with Godot’s own UI toolkit and in a CAD application you probably don’t care about some of the downsides this would entail for a CRUD app (accessibility, perhaps text layout etc.).
I'm currently in the process of creating a piece of development software and needed a cross-platform GUI environment to do it with.
I first tried Maui because its seemingly so highly rated and recommended. It turned out to be a complete nightmare. Even just installing it didn't just work, I had to spend 2-3 hours just to get that going and then when trying some basic things for my UI it turned out to just not be supported.
The next on the list was AvaloniaUI and wow, it was the complete opposite experience. Installation was a breeze and with only a marginal bit of googling I managed to do all kinds of things such as making a top-most only borderless transparent window etc.
The interface in Visual Studio could be a bit better overall, but compared to Maui its light-years ahead.
I go to "Launch MAUI in your browser" [0] in section "Try It Right Now". I click on "Word puzzle - A word puzzle game", third of the demo apps. I click on the "Randomize" button. Tiles start shifting around. I click on the left arrow at the top to go back to the main menu. The whole thing becomes locked with the word puzzle on the background and the main menu on top of it. Nothing is clickable any more.
Yeah the shuffling takes ages. Once it's finished you can go back. Also the movement of the tiles feels very strange with the mouse. The Click-Drag sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. No visual feedback is given on click. The tiles don't move but teleport, which is strange for a click-drag interaction. A simple click would have been better, or a move animation. Someone else noticed it, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45893986#45897805
Finally, finally, I can use something apart from Kotlin Multiplatform and Electron to build slow alien-looking applications with annoying animations and phone-styled UX for Linux (and, let me guess, there is no native Wayland backend). Of course the set of widgets is comprehensive - there are button and checkboxes, what else might we need.
I'm wondering why all the demos of modern UI toolkits look and feel worse than Delphi 1 demos from prehistoric age.
You can (and could have for a while now) just use Avalonia natively. It supports Windows/Mac/Linux/WASM natively already. I think this work is primarily for those who already have MAUI apps and want to target Linux/WASM from an existing codebase.
It seems like alot of people in this thread dont undestand the dotnet stack. MAUI, Native UIs, and WASM are all interchangable. Your cross platform app could literly be built out of everyone of of these components at once. MAUI is not required for use-cases generally when you have a webUI, its really targetting at the simple UI, write-once, run anywhere crowd. Once you outgrow it, you can move to native integrations using dotnet linux/mac/windows. Or you can just integrate with webviews, and have C# backend's or WASM backends. The combination is limitless.
Xamarin turned into dotnet, Xamarin.forms turned into turned into Maui. Name another large tech company that has embraced community projects like this and pushed provided enterprise support for community driven stuff over the same period.
I was writing cross-platform apps before Flutter, angular, or whatever other language you choose for 11yrs now. Find another framework thats done this before the scare tactics of "MS will abandon this" rhetroic. dotnet is the premier cross-platform enterprise ready framework full stop. No other framwork has the backwards compatiblty while maintaining paritity with the latest OS APIs. No other framework can serve millions of pages per/sec while supporting pixel perfect UIs and code-reuse. They have invested so much money in building automation that means as soon as the OS releases an API, your getting access to it. In real world terms, this is what counts if you want to build cross-platform stuff that your clients cant tell isn't native.
I run the same code from 2014, today, in apps in all the stores. Over the years all i have had to change is various namespaces to take advantage of the latest enhancements. Code that ran on dotnet4, silverlight, xamarin, still runs today on dotnet10. I share 90% of code across all platforms yet clients cant tell they are not native apps. Thats what i call return on investment.
I agree that, despite all the complaining, code re-use and longevity on .NET is second to none.
Where there is intense confusion in these comments is in thinking that MAUI is a web application framework. MAUI is "cross-platform" as you say but really mobile first with desktop brought along for the ride. It is in no-way intended to be a web application tech.
Avalonia has created an Avalonia back-end for MAUI which means running MAUI apps wherever Avalonia is supported, and that includes WASM. So now you can run MAUI apps in a browser. You can but that does not make MAUI web tech.
I can run Windows 95 in a browser. That does not make Win32 a web API.
The sliding puzzle is really finicky, have to try multiple times to slide stuff, the top left (back) arrow stopped working altogether until I refreshed the page, which of course takes you back to the original page... The time picker looks awful with the numbers not centrally aligned to the control (they look too high), and it's finnicky to use / same with the date picker.
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:
I wouldn't use it for consumer apps because it requires a Websocket connection to maintain state and probably doesn't scale very cheaply... but for business applications or personal tools it's actually kind of insane how much functionality you get out of the box (at least by the standards of statically typed languages).
.NET works amazingly on the web. This is just not the UI framework you would use.
There is ASP.NET of course and Razor Pages. We all use apps built with these every day without even realizing it. There are other great frameworks as well.
I do not even see Blazor as a real web technology but of course it is positioned that way.
MAUI is a "cross-platform" and frankly mobile first UI framework. It was never meant for the web.
You can make your own better system which supports GUI and provides a reasonable runtime that works on all current major platforms and provides development tools, years of ecosystem development, etc. etc.
If it's better than what MAUI provides and you can support it for years, I'm sure that could take over and many people would use it instead. But... will you and why?
To clarify, it's using React Native XAML, where XAML is Microsoft tech for building UIs. So they are dogfooding but they have too many UI frameworks to choose from.
You wouldn’t use MAUI to build something for only one platform. You would just use whatever it’s an abstraction over for that platform which in the case of Windows is WinUI.
It's a nice idea, but the execution is taking the wrong path in my opinion. By rendering everything to a `<canvas>` they're sacrificing any hope of accessibility and compatibility with browser standards for UX.
I would have much preferred a React-Native-style approach, where they render to true HTML instead. Even then, WASM files are too heavy for quick loading times without good internet (and sometimes even with).
The projects I see that would most benefit from something like this are complex internal apps that need to be used in different places but aren't worth porting over/rewriting, but they would also suffer from terrible UX given the constraints of this design.
For all other projects, it makes for more sense to use React Native.
It's great to have .NET ecosystem expanding.
I am a .NET dev, and I still use web optimized for mobile as my mobile platform(where applicable). Tried MAUI and all the other stuff, just doesn't cut it for me. You can make an app using it, but I would rather not to. The best 'mobile platform' for me was blazor hybrid, but then again - if it's already blazor why not go full web...I guess it depends on the 'seriousness' of your mobile application. If I had to develop a complex mobile app, I might choose another language framework, cause MAUI uses XAML and MVVM stuff that is quite a big overhead IMO.
Open the demo... takes forever to load... open first app, calculator... looks awful... presses back (Chrome on Android)... back navigation is broken and it leaves the whole app returning to the previous website.
Would be interested to know about the a11y story on web and other platforms. Does it integrate with screen readers, accessible navigation tools, a11y apis, etc.
This is somewhere quite a few tools fall down. For example, for web: Rendering to canvas doesn't create the dom nodes required to hook into the tools, and creating the nodes appropriately can have a significant performance impact.
What about native a11y tools and tech.. there are some ios specific ones that you'd expect on an ios app for example.
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.
Well, I guess Avalonia can solve 4 at least as you can negate a binding[1]. Good news for me as I recently started an Avalonia project, and thought you did still need an InvertedBoolConverter.
A toolkit announcing “Linux support” is pretty ambiguous. Does it mean Xorg support? Wayland support? Framebuffer support? The announcement provides no clue about this.
They are not announcing Linux support for Avalonia. It has long supported Linux.
What they are announcing is being able to run MAUI on Avalonia such that you can run your MAUI apps on any Avalonia supported target. This includes both Linux and WASM, neither of which is supported by MAUI directly.
Since it's using Avalonia, I'd say it's just X support at the moment. They've announced that they intend to support Wayland, but that was a couple months ago[1], so I doubt that's ready.
Building MAUI with Binding/Layout/Themes on top of another engine with Binding/Layout/Themes doesn't sound efficient.
Plus, it is my assumption/understanding that there's no way 3rd party controls will be able to run on Linux/Browser unless they're built directly against MAUI API without any Native our Skia dependencies, which is almost never the case from the libraries I've been using.
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).
A while ago I was at an agency and we got a client that was a very popular weather app. Things like mapbox and some analytics libs (can't remember exactly, this was 2019) The project was a big redesign of the app. We looked into using Xamarin to see if we can at least write the core logic in C#. The issue we ran into is that there were many third party libraries we needed to import that weren't converted to Xamarin/C#. There was a way to try and have it automatically bind but never worked properly. In the end we just went pure native. Turns out Xamarin was a fun toy framework but Microsoft couldn't point us to anything serious and battle tested in production written in it.
I'm curious to see if .NET MAUI will surpass Xamarin and actually get serious adoption. They have to figure out the third party binding issue.
I clicked a total of three times in the demo page before the tab froze and locked up.
MAUI is nice, and I'm glad it's getting decent Linux support now, but I would never use it in the browser.
Avalonia's big money ticket is taking old WPF projects, making minor changes to the XML to load their tools, and instantly making the projects work on macOS/Android/iOS/etc. (for an enterprise fee, of course). Great for forcing internal .NET applications built to run on Windows Vista into the modern world, but I don't think their web platform is a good idea for new projects because of the massive overhead you end up with.
If it runs on Avalonia anyway why choose MAUI? If you have the option just use Avalonia.
MAUI is unfinished and its docs is awful.
Do you want to build an app using MAUI? Unless you build an app that barely deviates from the template, expect to desperately search through decade old Xamarin documentation and figure out the details through painful trial and error.
It is a way to get people choosing the "official" path (ie. choosing MAUI) to experience Avalonia. They are hoping you come for the MAUI and stay for the Avalonia and become an Avalonia developer.
As for, why choose the Avalonia version of MAUI, there are three reasons:
- Linux support (the big one I think)
- Drawn framework (same renderer on all platforms)
- WASM support (probably useful sometimes but not the real draw)
They are making a big deal of WASM here because it is easy to demo. We can all go into it and run it. But do we want to use it for our apps?
As for, why not Avalonia directly? To loop back to the beginning, it is because you do not yet know Avalonia and trust it. The Avalonia team is hoping this helps with that.
This is what mystifies me about this announcement. Avalonia already works fine on Linux, allowing anyone to build a cross-platform .NET GUI application.
MAUI is supposed to be a wrapper around native widgets. The fact that they had to use Avalonia under the covers to get it to work on Linux seems to defeat the point. (Avalonia is a complete UI toolkit, like Qt or Flutter, that owns the entire stack from XAML to pixels.)
This is absolutely horrible and I hope I never have to use it on the web - right click doesn't work, my plugins don't work, I can't even open DevTools and when I manage (before the app has loaded), it's just a <canvas> element in the page. I know a lot of people put work into this and something is probably better than nothing, but actually no, I think such solutions are disgusting.
If you're gonna claim cross platform, don't just stoop down to the lowest common denominator and write a bunch of pixels to the screen, use the damn system UI solutions, or in the case of web apps - HTML, CSS and JS/WASM. I already take an issue with Electron (Lazarus lcl did things right, in contrast) but realize that it yields a lot of utility, yet these canvas based approaches for web apps feel like a step too far.
Yet obviously nobody can admit that they can't do the heavy lifting needed to support multiple different target platforms for the same widgets in a way that respects the corresponding platforms, while also still wanting to ship something. In this case, I think nothing is better than something, if that something is so bad.
I've pretty much considered MAUI a non-starter without Linux desktop as a target and even with this, not sure I would consider it over just using Avalonia directly. Of course, it is nice to see this option getting flushed out for existing projects.
Does "Web" mean fully wasm (i.e. weird quasi-useless dialect that can't run a lot of code without being specifically aware of it's wasm/webiness) or some combination of that and a server?
This is a huge win for people using MAUI. The only thing I worry is some performance loss from using Avalonia backend instead of using directly the target platform.
Honestly, I feel that everything UI related has gone backwards to the stone age.
I wonder how hard would it be to go back to visual designers like we had with Delphi or VB6. There were flexible layout container components which helped a lot when adapting forms to varying screen resolutions.
Pathetic that MS doesn’t manage to do this themselves.
Even more pathetic that MS doesn’t actually use it for any of their products, so forgive me if I have very little faith in the future of MAUI with all its bugs.
tThis is another horrible, "lets render everything in canvas" framework so no select, no OS level context menu, no accessabiltiy, can't look up a word using your OSes dictionary, no IME support so no Japan/Korean/Chinese/Thai input, no find, no extensions, because there's no structure to look at, no translation extensions, in fact no translation period. Ugh!
Not in the industry I work in - AAA gamedev. Art folks typically would have two, or even three monitors - so good solutions for docking across them (and still working) are required.
A chrome browser by itself can't work that - it's great for many things, but not for Creative Tools.
MAUI is first and foremost a mobile UI framework. It was built for iOS and Android. The desktop is added on as a bonus so that you can target macOS and Windows as well.
If you are building a Windows desktop application though, Microsoft does not want you to use MAUI. You use MAUI because iOS and Android are your top platforms and you want to target macOS and Windows without writing dedicated applications.
Linux has always been missing. This Avalonia port fills that gap.
You would not target the web with MAUI either. I guess "you can" now because WASM is one of the platforms that Avalonia supports. Again, I guess you might if you already have a MAUI app and do not want to create one for the web. But you would never set out to create a MAUI app for the web.
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.
judah|3 months ago
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.
taftster|3 months ago
This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion.
But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.
a2128|3 months ago
LeFantome|3 months ago
WASM is just one of the platforms that Avalonia supports and so, if you run MAUI on Avalonia, you can run it on WASM.
If you do that though, it is going to be like rendering any other desktop GUI toolkit in WASM. It is not a web app. I mean, it is cool you can do it and MAUI in WASM is better than no web capability at all I guess. But you would never set out to create a web app in MAUI.
MAUI on Avalonia on WASM is really a modern replacement for Silverlight. And it will likely be about as popular.
The really cool thing is being able to target the Linux desktop finally. A lot of people will love that.
And, while MAUI was meant to use native controls on each platform, many people may prefer the Avalonia approach of having your app render the same everywhere.
cheema33|3 months ago
I was intrigued before I read this. This stuff is a non-starter for me.
mhitza|3 months ago
DeathArrow|3 months ago
That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps.
If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.
cebert|3 months ago
osigurdson|3 months ago
jermaustin1|3 months ago
1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet.
I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).
nicoburns|3 months ago
We're betting on this over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus where we're building a cross-platform UI solution that enables you to do this by having a web-centric API (we are developing our own custom HTML/CSS renderer for native platforms).
kazinator|3 months ago
BoorishBears|3 months ago
I get the value in this and realize it's not for your polished -$500 ARPU consumer social apps, but man this is weird.
(Also if anyone who worked on it is here, it's crashing for me on OSX 26, Chrome 142.0.7444.135, if I run an animation and hit back as the animation finishes)
VikingCoder|3 months ago
pjmlp|3 months ago
We got all the plugins back.
mattfrommars|3 months ago
Why build a product on MAUI when Microsoft aren't too sure about it.
oaiey|3 months ago
It is history not the lack of will. At one point the windows division was in shambles (remember vista) and WPF pops up. At another point, the windows and dev division have no answers to the office group (because you know who uses non win tech) so they went react. And then external devs screamed: where is the .net cross platform story so Microsoft acquired xamarin and later form Maui out of it.
It is history not lack of trust. But the outcome is the same: lackluster support for all UI toolkits.
Kyrio|3 months ago
The point about them not using MAUI still stands though. From what I understand, the .NET world has either adopted different abstractions like Avalonia, or stuck with tried and tested solutions like WinForms with proprietary controls. After all, they've seen this before with WPF which was never fully adopted by MS either, or with the debacle around Metro/WinRT. You're never quite sure what Microsoft wants you to use or will support in the long term. They also make Blazor, which is a different (and likely more accessible) way to build web apps with .NET.
Since we're on the subject of companies not dogfooding their shiny tech, is Google really using Flutter for their own apps? I feel like the evolution of the Android ecosystem towards Kotlin and Jetpack Compose implies otherwise.
mdasen|3 months ago
Microsoft Teams was released in March 2017. .NET MAUI was released in May 2022. In 2021, Microsoft replaced Angular with React and moved away from Electron to WebView2 (using the OS' built-in renderer rather than a bundled Chromium). So even the rewrite was a year before MAUI (and they probably started the rewrite before 2021). Plus, part of the point of using React there was that they could basically replace Angular bit by bit.
Microsoft Teams is just older than MAUI. It's like asking why Hadoop is written in Java and not Go or Rust or why Kafka is written in Scala and not Kotlin. Kafka was open sourced in January 2011 and Kotlin came out in July 2011. Kotlin wasn't an option given that they were developing it years before the language was released.
That's not to say that Microsoft's attitude toward MAUI doesn't leave concerns. There was some news a while back about a bunch of layoffs around MAUI. It's always concerning when there doesn't appear to be any dog-fooding going on - is this just some junk they're throwing at us that they don't want to use? I think some hesitation also comes from the Blazor side where it's looking like Microsoft doesn't really see Blazor as a React competitor so much as a way for internal company apps to be made quickly - in contrast to the Google IO presentations on WASM support for Dart/Flutter where they were emphasizing better-than-JS performance.
That said, Microsoft hasn't really released a lot of new (green field) stuff over the past 2-3 years. What product should they have made in MAUI, but didn't? You can't say Teams because that was a giant product way before MAUI even existed. Most of what Microsoft is doing is work on existing products - things they released before 2023/2024 and were in development before MAUI existed. Flutter had a 5 year head start on MAUI.
But there certainly is a feeling that Microsoft doesn't feel committed to it or at least not enough to put its weight behind it.
latentsea|3 months ago
layer8|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
vjvjvjvjghv|3 months ago
I think it’s better on the server side with ASP.NET.
As far as I have heard MAUI is pretty buggy and has lost momentum. It will probably go on the long list of basically abandoned .NET UI frameworks
DANmode|3 months ago
MAUI was to get them through to where everyone wants webapps - served from an Azure backend, of course.
georgemcbay|3 months ago
Eventually dumped it and moved to Kotlin Compose/Multiplatform, which is just so much better at achieving a similar goal (though, obviously, without being part of the .NET ecosystem).
gfody|3 months ago
arkensaw|3 months ago
> 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.
ForHackernews|3 months ago
coffeeaddict1|3 months ago
Interesting, I wonder how good Impeller is and if it's actually better than the new Graphite backend of Skia.
keyle|3 months ago
the big difference is this
or as described here [2] [1] https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller[2] https://medium.com/@raiden.lpf666/skia-vs-impeller-a-perform...
BatteryMountain|3 months ago
DeathArrow|3 months ago
mwkaufma|3 months ago
mrcsharp|3 months ago
I wish we can go back to UIs that focus on information density and usability. I love looking at Japanese websites because of this.
jeroenhd|3 months ago
You can check out the Avalonia demo reel to see what you can already do with the .NET GUI stack that MAUI now uses on Linux and on the web: https://avaloniaui.net/showcase
zerr|3 months ago
wvbdmp|3 months ago
thewebguyd|3 months ago
WPF & WinForms are also still around
animal531|3 months ago
I first tried Maui because its seemingly so highly rated and recommended. It turned out to be a complete nightmare. Even just installing it didn't just work, I had to spend 2-3 hours just to get that going and then when trying some basic things for my UI it turned out to just not be supported.
The next on the list was AvaloniaUI and wow, it was the complete opposite experience. Installation was a breeze and with only a marginal bit of googling I managed to do all kinds of things such as making a top-most only borderless transparent window etc.
The interface in Visual Studio could be a bit better overall, but compared to Maui its light-years ahead.
genezeta|3 months ago
I go to "Launch MAUI in your browser" [0] in section "Try It Right Now". I click on "Word puzzle - A word puzzle game", third of the demo apps. I click on the "Randomize" button. Tiles start shifting around. I click on the left arrow at the top to go back to the main menu. The whole thing becomes locked with the word puzzle on the background and the main menu on top of it. Nothing is clickable any more.
This happens on various different browsers.
[0] https://brave-sky-0c7a41a03-preview.westeurope.3.azurestatic...
cachius|3 months ago
boobsbr|3 months ago
7/9 = 1
Tried the RPN calculator:
Can't push any numbers to the stack, so I can't use any operator.
mlvljr|3 months ago
[deleted]
pshirshov|3 months ago
I'm wondering why all the demos of modern UI toolkits look and feel worse than Delphi 1 demos from prehistoric age.
davey48016|3 months ago
I'm sure there's a better place to track the progress on that.
nu11ptr|3 months ago
weq|3 months ago
Xamarin turned into dotnet, Xamarin.forms turned into turned into Maui. Name another large tech company that has embraced community projects like this and pushed provided enterprise support for community driven stuff over the same period.
I was writing cross-platform apps before Flutter, angular, or whatever other language you choose for 11yrs now. Find another framework thats done this before the scare tactics of "MS will abandon this" rhetroic. dotnet is the premier cross-platform enterprise ready framework full stop. No other framwork has the backwards compatiblty while maintaining paritity with the latest OS APIs. No other framework can serve millions of pages per/sec while supporting pixel perfect UIs and code-reuse. They have invested so much money in building automation that means as soon as the OS releases an API, your getting access to it. In real world terms, this is what counts if you want to build cross-platform stuff that your clients cant tell isn't native.
I run the same code from 2014, today, in apps in all the stores. Over the years all i have had to change is various namespaces to take advantage of the latest enhancements. Code that ran on dotnet4, silverlight, xamarin, still runs today on dotnet10. I share 90% of code across all platforms yet clients cant tell they are not native apps. Thats what i call return on investment.
LeFantome|3 months ago
Where there is intense confusion in these comments is in thinking that MAUI is a web application framework. MAUI is "cross-platform" as you say but really mobile first with desktop brought along for the ride. It is in no-way intended to be a web application tech.
Avalonia has created an Avalonia back-end for MAUI which means running MAUI apps wherever Avalonia is supported, and that includes WASM. So now you can run MAUI apps in a browser. You can but that does not make MAUI web tech.
I can run Windows 95 in a browser. That does not make Win32 a web API.
sylens|3 months ago
labrador|3 months ago
davey48016|3 months ago
LandR|3 months ago
The sliding puzzle is really finicky, have to try multiple times to slide stuff, the top left (back) arrow stopped working altogether until I refreshed the page, which of course takes you back to the original page... The time picker looks awful with the numbers not centrally aligned to the control (they look too high), and it's finnicky to use / same with the date picker.
Awful.
cachius|3 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45893986#45897572
SigmundA|3 months ago
https://avaloniaui.net/blog/avalonia-partners-with-google-s-...
bandrami|3 months ago
catmanjan|3 months ago
maybewhenthesun|3 months ago
"What is the Avalonia MAUI Backend?
At its core, the Avalonia MAUI Backend enables you to keep your MAUI codebase while replacing the rendering layer with Avalonia."
Which tells me exactly nothing. what even is MAUI, maybe some polynesian deity? :-P
I know, I know, I can google stuff. But still...
mfro|3 months ago
JamesSwift|3 months ago
maxrmk|3 months ago
I really love C# and the .net ecosystem, but they just haven't made it work for web.
BoorishBears|3 months ago
I wouldn't use it for consumer apps because it requires a Websocket connection to maintain state and probably doesn't scale very cheaply... but for business applications or personal tools it's actually kind of insane how much functionality you get out of the box (at least by the standards of statically typed languages).
To replicate this example in Typescript, I'd probably still be installing packages in the time it took to write the 20 lines of code it contains: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/compone...
LeFantome|3 months ago
There is ASP.NET of course and Razor Pages. We all use apps built with these every day without even realizing it. There are other great frameworks as well.
I do not even see Blazor as a real web technology but of course it is positioned that way.
MAUI is a "cross-platform" and frankly mobile first UI framework. It was never meant for the web.
imcritic|3 months ago
viraptor|3 months ago
If it's better than what MAUI provides and you can support it for years, I'm sure that could take over and many people would use it instead. But... will you and why?
piskov|3 months ago
Also C# and .net overall are so damn good.
Anything to abolish the js and constant hacks upon hacks
keyle|3 months ago
tylerchilds|3 months ago
.NET Maui running on windows seems like a more logical first step to prove the organization buys their own dogfood.
Rohansi|3 months ago
To clarify, it's using React Native XAML, where XAML is Microsoft tech for building UIs. So they are dogfooding but they have too many UI frameworks to choose from.
ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6|3 months ago
mnemonet|3 months ago
I would have much preferred a React-Native-style approach, where they render to true HTML instead. Even then, WASM files are too heavy for quick loading times without good internet (and sometimes even with).
The projects I see that would most benefit from something like this are complex internal apps that need to be used in different places but aren't worth porting over/rewriting, but they would also suffer from terrible UX given the constraints of this design.
For all other projects, it makes for more sense to use React Native.
cryptonym|3 months ago
Would you complain that Qwasm/Dwasm doesn't follow HTML standards of accessibility?
binary132|3 months ago
r0x0r007|3 months ago
rkagerer|3 months ago
This could have been so much better.
trentnix|3 months ago
Edit - for those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
time4tea|3 months ago
This is somewhere quite a few tools fall down. For example, for web: Rendering to canvas doesn't create the dom nodes required to hook into the tools, and creating the nodes appropriately can have a significant performance impact.
What about native a11y tools and tech.. there are some ios specific ones that you'd expect on an ios app for example.
skrig|3 months ago
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
accoil|3 months ago
[1]: https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/reference/built-in-data-bin...
WhyNotHugo|3 months ago
LeFantome|3 months ago
What they are announcing is being able to run MAUI on Avalonia such that you can run your MAUI apps on any Avalonia supported target. This includes both Linux and WASM, neither of which is supported by MAUI directly.
accoil|3 months ago
[1]: https://avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-wayland-support-to-aval...
johnuterry|3 months ago
Plus, it is my assumption/understanding that there's no way 3rd party controls will be able to run on Linux/Browser unless they're built directly against MAUI API without any Native our Skia dependencies, which is almost never the case from the libraries I've been using.
Am I right?
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
textlapse|3 months ago
**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.
breve|3 months ago
Yes. They're also looking at offering Impeller as a render option:
https://avaloniaui.net/blog/avalonia-partners-with-google-s-...
flanbiscuit|3 months ago
I'm curious to see if .NET MAUI will surpass Xamarin and actually get serious adoption. They have to figure out the third party binding issue.
srott|3 months ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnetMAUI/comments/1l1xiib/entire_...
jeroenhd|3 months ago
MAUI is nice, and I'm glad it's getting decent Linux support now, but I would never use it in the browser.
Avalonia's big money ticket is taking old WPF projects, making minor changes to the XML to load their tools, and instantly making the projects work on macOS/Android/iOS/etc. (for an enterprise fee, of course). Great for forcing internal .NET applications built to run on Windows Vista into the modern world, but I don't think their web platform is a good idea for new projects because of the massive overhead you end up with.
collaborative|3 months ago
lpln3452|3 months ago
Do you want to build an app using MAUI? Unless you build an app that barely deviates from the template, expect to desperately search through decade old Xamarin documentation and figure out the details through painful trial and error.
Good luck.
LeFantome|3 months ago
It is a way to get people choosing the "official" path (ie. choosing MAUI) to experience Avalonia. They are hoping you come for the MAUI and stay for the Avalonia and become an Avalonia developer.
As for, why choose the Avalonia version of MAUI, there are three reasons: - Linux support (the big one I think) - Drawn framework (same renderer on all platforms) - WASM support (probably useful sometimes but not the real draw)
They are making a big deal of WASM here because it is easy to demo. We can all go into it and run it. But do we want to use it for our apps?
As for, why not Avalonia directly? To loop back to the beginning, it is because you do not yet know Avalonia and trust it. The Avalonia team is hoping this helps with that.
munchler|3 months ago
MAUI is supposed to be a wrapper around native widgets. The fact that they had to use Avalonia under the covers to get it to work on Linux seems to defeat the point. (Avalonia is a complete UI toolkit, like Qt or Flutter, that owns the entire stack from XAML to pixels.)
https://avaloniaui.net/maui-compare
KronisLV|3 months ago
This is absolutely horrible and I hope I never have to use it on the web - right click doesn't work, my plugins don't work, I can't even open DevTools and when I manage (before the app has loaded), it's just a <canvas> element in the page. I know a lot of people put work into this and something is probably better than nothing, but actually no, I think such solutions are disgusting.
If you're gonna claim cross platform, don't just stoop down to the lowest common denominator and write a bunch of pixels to the screen, use the damn system UI solutions, or in the case of web apps - HTML, CSS and JS/WASM. I already take an issue with Electron (Lazarus lcl did things right, in contrast) but realize that it yields a lot of utility, yet these canvas based approaches for web apps feel like a step too far.
Yet obviously nobody can admit that they can't do the heavy lifting needed to support multiple different target platforms for the same widgets in a way that respects the corresponding platforms, while also still wanting to ship something. In this case, I think nothing is better than something, if that something is so bad.
OsrsNeedsf2P|3 months ago
[0] https://mauikit.org/ [1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35
tracker1|3 months ago
mhh__|3 months ago
thiago_fm|3 months ago
I hope Microsoft delivers though, we need more alternatives to React + RN or Flutter.
DeathArrow|3 months ago
sharts|3 months ago
baq|3 months ago
luismedel|3 months ago
I wonder how hard would it be to go back to visual designers like we had with Delphi or VB6. There were flexible layout container components which helped a lot when adapting forms to varying screen resolutions.
Jnr|3 months ago
jeroenhd|3 months ago
moi2388|3 months ago
Pathetic that MS doesn’t manage to do this themselves.
Even more pathetic that MS doesn’t actually use it for any of their products, so forgive me if I have very little faith in the future of MAUI with all its bugs.
999900000999|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
zerr|3 months ago
rohan_|3 months ago
This feels like it could be a competitor to QT, but without a real-time operating system like QNX, what's the point?
React Native won out over Fluter, Java Applets lost to HTML5 / JS, Framer is much better than Wordpress.
Time and time again, clever simulations on top of the native world are never worth it.
9cb14c1ec0|3 months ago
wiseowise|3 months ago
socalgal2|3 months ago
arcosdev|3 months ago
arwhatever|3 months ago
alvinveroy|3 months ago
[deleted]
drykjdryj|3 months ago
js4ever|3 months ago
malkia|3 months ago
A chrome browser by itself can't work that - it's great for many things, but not for Creative Tools.
LeFantome|3 months ago
If you are building a Windows desktop application though, Microsoft does not want you to use MAUI. You use MAUI because iOS and Android are your top platforms and you want to target macOS and Windows without writing dedicated applications.
Linux has always been missing. This Avalonia port fills that gap.
You would not target the web with MAUI either. I guess "you can" now because WASM is one of the platforms that Avalonia supports. Again, I guess you might if you already have a MAUI app and do not want to create one for the web. But you would never set out to create a MAUI app for the web.
lazypenguin|3 months ago
labrador|3 months ago
labrador|3 months ago
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.
piskov|3 months ago
thrownaway561|3 months ago