this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Programming
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Well… this is pretty crappy.
I built a Xamarin app (mac/iOS) because I wanted portability to windows. Then I was forced to upgrade to .net 6/7 because of a library I needed, and that meant upgrading to .Net for Mac/.Net for iOS (which is part of MAUI, but not using MAUI UI controls). MAUI is definitely undercooked at the moment.
What an awful and painful process, but I’m finally there… and they drop the main IDE for development. Damn.
VSCode doesn’t have a visual UI designer (well… neither does VSMac, but it does prepare a copy of your project and opens XCode for editing the storyboard/images, and copies changes back). So does this mean they will add that to VSCode? Or will we all have to switch to raw edits of XML to create UIs like you have to do with MAUI? Ick.
Developing GUIs for windows using MS tools is a lesson in frustration, especially when you want to have cross platform capabilities… WPF -> WinForms -> Xamarin -> Xamarin.Forms -> MAUI/.Net for {Mac,iOS}… Not to mention UWP… Each transition is a rewrite. Damn.
Yeah... that's why almost nobody uses Xamarin. The fast approaching train if you're invested in Xamarin (for others, the light at the end of the tunnel) is SwiftUI which is the first good SDK designed to create cross platform user interfaces.
SwiftUI isn't on Windows yet - but it's coming.
Its hard to make a commercial decision for something that’s coming someday. But I hope it does arrive - I like Swift as a language (OMG - it was such a pleasure after the ugliness that is Objective C).