However, UI frameworks that render widgets themselves, using drawing APIs, are a completely different story. Where platforms deviated, complexity started. Build-in widgets were lowest common denominator, primarily supporting only features avaliable on all platforms. IMO, the source of the problem was that it's widgets used native widgets for rendering. Issue with Xamarin.Forms was that provided widgets were quite lackluster and to write custom widgets you had to know native APIs of multiple platforms. I bet big on Xamarin being the right approach I still think it is, but Microsoft really dropped the ball since the acquisition. NET client technology… I was really hoping (and still hope) for a turnaround. WPF is fine, but then why on earth would you choose that over electron or WebView2, which solves some of the resource problems from pure electron.Īll of this is coming from someone whose entire career is built on. But if you don’t care about the UX, web technologies are almost certainly a better choice.Īs for native desktop, you’d have to be really stupid to choose WinUI or UWP, unless the point of the app is to be a WinUI or UWP demo. your a corporate form developer and don’t care about your users) MAUI is a great choice. If you don’t care about the quality of your app (e.g. I don’t think Microsoft has enough engineers assigned to this project to make it successful.
The developer experience is better, but there are lots of bugs in basic functionality that make it difficult to use. I was hoping MAUI would fix a lot of the quality issues, but like any big rewrite, it seems to have traded one set of problems for another. So as for why Xamarin wasn’t discussed for the last few years, it’s probably because Microsoft put it in a coma for 2 years. NET ecosystem is that you have a rich set of tools that saves time and enhances developer productivity. If you’re used to command line that may not seem like a big deal, but the whole point of the.
#Xamarin studio ios 7 for mac#
Microsoft stopped development (more or less) around May 2020 to focus on MAUI, which was released in November 2020.Īctually it wasn’t - MAUI wasn’t released until May 2022, tooling was just released July 2022 for Windows, and VS for Mac with proper support has yet to be released. Thankfully in the end we just split up into 2 teams and wrote the app in native iOS and Android. They couldn't point us to any big well-known names using Xamarin and they couldn't help us with any of the missing or broken bindings we needed.
We were in contact with someone at Microsoft during this exploration and even they couldn't help us. We needed Mapbox, Firebase analytics & Crashlytics, and some other ones. The client required us to use a bunch of third party libraries and we either couldn't find them at all, or found ones that didn't work. For very popular libs, the Xamarin team maintains these bindings, for others, you need to rely on open source ones. Xamarin provides a way to use existing 3rd party libs written in native iOS/Android by creating "bindings". So we still needed to write 2 separate UI codes, which Xamarin allows for because it exposes the complete SDKs for both platforms via Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. You can use Xamarin.Forms to write cross-platform UI, but our UI was complicated enough (a weather app with lots of custom UI) that Xamarin.Forms would not have worked for us. We looked hard into using Xamarin for this but in the end concluded that it was not ready yet.
#Xamarin studio ios 7 android#
At a previous agency job, I was on a project that was re-writing an iOS and Android app used by millions of people.