A developer had to open an issue to complain about another issue not being fixed. “The lack of response to issues IS the issue,” was the complaint.
The problems are manifold, or so said the dev. Windows with frames are drawn incorrectly, requiring a resize to be forced to get what should happen automatically to correct itself. Platform-specific code is needed in places where it really shouldn’t be, and so on.
In words familiar to many who have had to endure the occasionally patchy approach to quality from Microsoft, the poster opined: “I think 90 percent of the attention should be placed on fixing bugs and performing better QA. I know stuff breaks from release to release and I would think that decent regression testing would catch stuff like this,” before thundering: "I have been a developer since 1984 and have focused much of my career on UI design. WinForms was great and WPF was even greater. MAUI isn’t even making the charts… "
A lot of us here talk about being responsive to our customers for a myriad of reasons; I don’t understand why other companies don’t get how important it is to test features, respond to and fix bugs!
I don’t know if you’ve contacted any Microsoft product recently, but their support teams behave as if they’re untouchable. I have had extremely poor experiences with Xbox support, App support, and Github support recently.
In every case, the staff member behaves as if no matter what they say they won’t be fired. My interaction with the App support wouldn’t even pass me to their supervisor when I asked (because they weren’t listening and just regurgitated non-relevant parts of the TOS to me).
I guess Microsoft is a great place to work since they will pay you to be awful to customers.
Unfortunately yes, I had to contact them due to an issue a customer had with something and it was terrible! If I behaved in that way I’d expect to have no customers left!
I don’t recall ever having a useful interaction with MSFT support; I have simply found the parts of their stack I used to be solid enough that when I occasionally encounter something I consider a bug or at least unexpected, there’s a reasonable workaround.
The ONLY time anything ever happened in response to me contacting them with a bug was many years ago when I found some code that was commented out for testing somewhere in the DataTable class and they had released without un-commenting it … it was fixed within a day or two but even then I never got an acknowledgment.
The responses I HAVE gotten are usually along the lines of, No One Else / Not Enough People Complained Yet Therefore This Doesn’t Exist For Us. In other words they are fine with bugs that impact a “small” number of people, where “small” is undefined but probably could be in the hundreds for all I know.
It seems like the framework itself has a mandate to be perfect as well as probably ASP.NET MVC Core, API development, networking stuff, and some other things … some things like WinForms and WPF are on life support basically, others like MAUI appear to be “bright shiny objects to dazzle people and give them hope”.
This is why I stick to console apps and services for the most part, very simple WinForms when I need an administrative GUI, and not a lot else. If I were going to embark on a cross platform journey I would probably go with a vibrant open source framework with a good sized community – likely, Avalonia. If I could be convinced that Blazor is stable and keeping devs happy I would do that or else ASP.NET MVC Core for a web app. But all this aspirational (and somewhat “yeah, okay, me too”) stuff like MAUI, my spider sense tingles too much.
These entire discussion about maui I told much before: without any reason for a hype. There was nothing inside what made it really interesting. If it would be that good and in that high quality and Support like Java I would change. But what I said wasn’t good enough. Too often I had to read: stop speaking about Java. So again: the MAUI Story is a painful story for every Developer.
Beside the missed portion of Support and the needed part of sustainability and the missing continuity MAUI is not the right tool as a major development base. I appreciate to find out that I was right and not using the libs for my Development. Even my customers wanted me to. I could resist in the knowledge that it will make my life more complex and has too many edges inside which are now and in future not working.
I think that what MSFT has done a good job with is the core platform and the “happy path” pieces relating to what most people do most of the time. MAUI is a typical v 1.0 MSFT effort and whether v3 or so sets the world on fire as is typical with them, depends on whether true single code base cross platform development becomes mainstream. Even then, I judge that MSFT has abandoned the desktop. WinForms and WPF are mature but stagnant, and I foresee the desktop targets for MAUI being poor stepchildren.
What is going on in the Java world in that regard? If one of your targets is desktop, is that a special source of grief? Are there signs that it’s a lower priority?
Bob, with JavaFX I have a good platform for CROSS Platform Development on Desktop, mobile and the Web. With Gluon and JPRO.ONE there are bleeding edge solutions to have this ability. So I am not in a problematical case to release Desktop, Web or mobile Solutions and also not to release embedded solutions. What I am doing also. As my Software in most cases needs to be cross platform I have not seen any other possible solution in that kind of quality to code. That’s it.
I sent this article to a former Xojo teammate who is now using .NET Maui. My comment to him was this sounds an awful like Xojo in many respects. Here was his response:
It sounds familiar indeed. The recently released .NET 8 was mostly bug fixes and refinements after what was essentially their first cross platform UI release with MAUI in .NET 7. What’s interesting and encouraging is .NET 9 MAUI is also focused on quality versus new features. It feels like Microsoft is pushing two UI frameworks, MAUI and MAUI Blazor Hybrid. They’re cross platform with the first using an OS native UI and the second using a web UI. Some think the latter may grow faster because of all the young web developers that prefer a Web UI over a native OS UI. All that said, C# and .NET are massive and impressive for incredible software developer productivity. I don’t think there is anything that comes close to the bang for the buck, with the buck being each line of code. Yep, I’m blown away by what can be done with minimal effort in C# with .NET. If there is a negative, it’s that each is huge and takes years to feel like an expert. Even as a novice, I’m cranking out code like never before.
Later he did ask if he should have some kool-aid.
I think with a larger user base there will be more complaints - not less. But also feel there’s probably more workarounds available for those problems because of the larger user base. Our issues with Xojo are the sheer number of bugs with no workarounds and few, if any solutions, because of the tiny user base and tiny engineering team.
MS has been tending to narrow the range of options it has for pursuing X-platform - which I think is a good sign that they have settled on The Way™
And in doing so they are focusing their considerable resources on those targets
Thats vastly different than Xojo which has roughly the same amount of resources now as it had 15+ years ago when I joined and yet has 4 more targets on their plate than when I joined
They’re stretched thin no matter how much they protest about being “adequately staffed”
Yes if I were embarking on such a project today, Avalonia would probably be the way I’d go. MAUI will need another year to gestate and we’ll see what people are saying around the time .NET 9 is released.
