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by WorldMaker
1483 days ago
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MAUI on Windows desktop is just a cross-platform wrapper around WinUI 3 (UWP's UI replacement) on top of WPF. Worst case, if you are building Windows Desktop apps, you eject back to WPF. [0] For the rest of the platforms you could switch to Avalonia or Uno perhaps. [0] Though of course the question then is that if you are building WinUI 3 apps and don't need cross-platform why you don't just use WPF directly, and I don't have a good answer there. I think MAUI might be slightly more appealing if there was a stronger bridge from "start with a WPF app then expand it to MAUI". (You can do it, in some ways it is straightforward, but it's not an official garden path.) (ETA: Though I get you on the VB.NET as gate idea. It's a big reason I still don't entirely trust Razor much less all the hype around Blazor. Blazor more than anything feels way too much "for people that missed Silverlight, here's a worse ASP.NET Core Silverlight" with shades of ASP Classic runat="server" full circle) |
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My home automation system runs as a .NET Framework WinForms app written in VB. I'm interested in moving it into two directions: I would rather run it as a service, and I would like to be able to run it on Linux. VB .NET works on .NET Core in Linux environments, without a UI framework like MAUI, this should be trivial to accomplish both... right? RIGHT?
Visual Studio happily provides a .NET Framework template for building a Windows Service (for C# or VB), which my app could work under pretty easily. Or there's a Worker Service template which is cross-platform .NET Core (for C# or F# only... for no technical reason whatsoever, Microsoft just didn't want to bother)
The Windows Service template provides basically the scaffolding entry points for every way you interact with a Windows Service, you can pretty much just paste the code in for what happens when the service starts and stops. This is straightforward and easy and you can tell was designed by the same sort of people who came up with the WinForms editor: It's simple, it's obvious, and anyone can do it. I wrote my first practical Windows service one day, and it was done that day.
There's instructions for turning a Worker Service into a Windows Service here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/wind... I think it's safe to say, this is not simple or straightforward in any way (especially since "Rewrite the entire worker class" is a step here...
And that gets you back to... a Windows-only service? What the actual heck?
So here's what I am mind-boggled hasn't happened here: Microsoft should have a cross-platform service template (in all supported languages, please and thank you), and it should give you entry points for starting and stopping the service and such which are all pretty much the same between operating systems, and then it should handle the scaffolding to translate it to the appropriate OS out of the box.