Is NET MAUI the future of cross platform development? We recently caught up with Ryan Gant from Bottle Rocket to find out. Developers can now use a unified framework supporting Android, iOS, Windows, Web, and Mac. It promises improved performance and seamless cross-platform development.
Thanks for the explanation! I recall something sort of similar happening years ago with Microsoft recommending WPF over WebForms even when it didn’t have all the same functionality or data controls yet. But at least they had different design considerations, separation of concerns and stuff. Still not quite sure what the different design ideas behind Xamarin and Maui is, but I probably have to actually try Maui to figure it out. Going purely by reading, it just seemed like the same purpose as Xamarin, so it didn’t seem like big enough impetus to learn something new yet and I haven’t been pushed to yet from an outside source, like my work. But I’m sure I’ll have to eventually if I keep working in industry places that like Microsoft enterprise software frameworks.
Xamarin had separate projects for each platform, whereas they’re all together in MAUI. Also Xamarin was tied to .NET Standard 2.1, whereas MAUI uses the latest .NET releases (starting with 5 or 6 - I’m now on 8). MAUI major releases now come out at the same time as Visual Studio updates. Also, as mentioned, MAUI uses handlers, but I’m still trying to work out how you actually use one to create a property (sigh). There was a few, annoying, breaking changes too. e.g. in Xamarin I could define the span and height of an element in a Grid with a single command, but now I have to use two (for some bizarre reason setting the column span is now entirely separate. I ended up writing my own function so I could do it all in 1 line again).