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by amir734jj 954 days ago
Microsoft employee here. There is a lot of momentum behind MAUI so I am optimistic.
9 comments

There's like... zero momentum behind MAUI. The wider industry has learned their lesson and nobody in their right mind would ever use MAUI for a new GUI project unless Microsoft converts 80% of their applications to it.

The only decent GUI framework for Windows is Electron, which is based on Chromium.

Microsoft's new GUI applications use Electron: VS Code, Azure Data Studio, etc...

In other words: Google makes the best Microsoft Windows GUI framework, as endorsed by Microsoft's own developers.

>The only decent GUI framework for Windows is Electron, which is based on Chromium.

Why not avalonia?

Ask that to Microsoft.
> The only decent GUI framework for Windows is Electron

What a peculiar way of spelling “WinForms”

Well, Microsoft ditched Electron for their new version of Teams.
The new framework for Teams is just an Edge-flavored version of Electron, not MAUI.
You're talking about momentum within Microsoft, I assume? There's no detectable momentum in the community at large. The ball hasn't even begun to roll. I have not heard or seen anyone using MAUI for anything serious so far. I've been writing Windows applications for 25 years at this point and am certainly not considering MAUI any time soon. They only just added keyboard accelerators--this is obviously not serious yet. To this day we are still writing Windows Forms applications. I'd consider embedding Blazor before I'd consider MAUI.

Having lived through a lot of Microsoft GUI frameworks, I would say that I won't be fooled this easily. Not with another half-assed unfinished library. I'll be interested once it qualifies as whole-assed and not a moment sooner.

Useful to know. So if I'm starting to build a new Windows app, what is Microsoft's recommendation?

Should I use MAUI? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne...) Or WPF? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/overvie...) Or WinForms? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/ov...) Or WinUI 2? Or WinUI 3? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/#compar...) Or React Native for Windows? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/ja...) Or Blazor? (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...) Or Win32? (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/desktop-prog...) Or even Xamarin? (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/xamarin/)

I feel like I might have missed a few...

And how confident are you that my choice isn't going to be deprecated in a couple of years? I'm not certain that "momentum" is worth much from a company who changes UI frameworks as often as some people change underwear...

Rookie mistake. The answer is obviously Silverlight.
No, win32 rules or maybe WTL or MFC or even Visual J++.
I wonder why this is. Is it because management is asleep at the wheel? Is it because teams competes with each other without direction from the top? Is it because heavy rotation of leadership who doesnt know better?

Any insiders?

Oh? I work for one of the largest jobs site in Asia. Maui has only one entry for the year 2023. Not sure what momentum are you talking about.
Use Outlook 365 and Teams School and Work to prove MAUI, then we’ll take it more seriously.
> There is a lot of momentum behind MAUI

Source?

I'm not entirely sure. SkiaSharp is the driver behind all the 2D graphics, isn't it? But the SkiaSharp repo is effectively unmaintained except maybe to support critical things for MAUI.
SkiaSharp has some MAUI integration, but AFAIK it's not used to render things. At least not when I last looked. On most (all?) platforms native drawing methods are used (which fits well into how MAUI works on each platform, admittedly). This comes with the drawback that performance varies wildly across platforms, however. (NB: I've last looked deeply into MAUI about a year ago, so things may have changed.)
Which Microsoft Product is using MAUI ? Any MS Windows App being built in MAUI ?
Word, Excel, Outlook.

Just kidding, it's probably some intern's dashboard that monitors their Clippy staging environments.

keep drinking that kool-aid.