Recently an idea came across my mind, and that is with all the fuss around Lemmy and fediverse in general, that i could spend my nights working on something instead of watching random YouTube stuff. So I’ve decided i could start building some kind of Android app, which will just be my time killer for the time being.

Just for some background info - I’m by no means considering myself a programmer, but I do write a lot of scripts/extensions/forms for software we use at work, which is mainly Microsoft stuff associated with .NET, so when it comes to programming I’m most familiar with C# and the whole .NET ecosystem. Lately I’ve also got into JS/TS with React as I wanted to create my own website.

Because I like C# as a language, i was looking into building this project in some kind of cross platform framework. I researched and found out about MAUI, Avalonia UI and such. As I was researching I found a lot of opinions on those frameworks, some of which were positive and some of which were negative. The negative ones outweigh the positive ones (bugs, broken basic features, messy workarounds, outdated underlying platform APIs) and such. I do know that such framework cannot be perfect because there is a lot of going on, and I would like to hear some more opinions.

So guys what are your experiences with those .NET frameworks? How is the XAML holding up? And do you think I would be better learning Flutter/Dart or straight up Kotlin, as the only platform I’m willing to develop for is Android?

Thanks!

  • @[email protected]
    5•2 years ago

    I wonder what would be the developer experience be like when developing a cross platform app: .NET vs Flutter

  • @[email protected]
    2•2 years ago

    I don’t have any experience, but have been looking into this space as well. Currently we have MAUI, Uno Platform and Avalonia UI. It looks like Microsoft is putting all their weight behind MAUI and for that reason only, I would expect it to win in the long run.

  • wave_walnut
    1•2 years ago

    I’m learning PWA (Progressive Web Apps) which is just HTML+JS web page installable on Android. About MAUI I’ve tried last year and felt it’s growing technology and difficult to layout UI parts (tend to force WinUI flavor on default).

    • @hurp_mcderp
      1•2 years ago

      I really like the idea of Blazor PWAs. Blazor just makes so much more sense to me rather than dealing with anything related to XAML/WPF/UWP. Developing with those just always felt so clunky and “anti-orthogonal” (best way I can describe it) to me. I felt I always had to remember really specific syntax and patterns to do things different things related to layout, databinding and styling. So much faffing about with custom ValueConverters and templates for something that Blazor can just do seamlessly with HTML. It all seemed so unintuitive compared to how Blazor really naturally extends HTML though C# without having to even touch javascript or its assorted frameworks and their additional hooha and complexity. Plus, if you wanted, you can take existing sites and HTML templates and fairly easily turn them into C# apps and give them access to .NET libraries.