MAUI, WinUI, Blazor etc

[Tomas]

Hi,

is Progress Telerik planning to develop controls for MAUI and for WinUI 3?

 

I think that WinUI will be targeted in MAUI. In general Telerik should start thinking how to unify its Xamarin (Android, iOS), WPF, UWP, WinForms and Blazor components in the same way as MS is going to target multiple target frameworks including web in MAUI, hopefully with some kind of XAML standard in mind.

Thank you

Regards Tomas Fabian

 

[Tomas]

I found this WinUI UI controls page as a partial answer for my post.

[Stefan]

Hi Tomas, 

Thanks for reaching out. 

We are closely monitoring and collaborating with Microsoft on all new technologies. You have already found the experimental Telerik UI for WinUI effort, as for MAUI it is too early to talk about it at this point. Still, we will continue to collaborate with the respective Microsoft teams and follow the progress on the technology. The current stance from Microsoft is that MAUI will become production ready at the end of 2021, which gives enough to to follow through its development and interest. 

With regards to WinUI and MAUI, I am not sure at this point it is not certain whether this is going to be the case, nether that XAML standard will be the way to go.

Please continue sharing your feedback and use cases as these help us shape plans accordingly. For example, could you please share what kind of app are you going to develop using MAUI and WinUI, do you need Blazor, WPF and UWP support, how do you envision such a development going, controls that you will need, everything else you find useful.

Thanks,

Stefan
Progress Telerik

[Tomas]

Hi Stefan,

thank you for your response. Our use case is the following. I'm researching available cross-platform eco systems from an architectonical standpoint. It would among other things increase code sharing and the productivity of our very few developers. I realize that 3rd party UI controls are very important for this to achieve. As far as I know Telerik Progress does not have plans to provide components for UNO Platform. I haven't tried Uno up to this time also for this reason, but on the other hand UNO seems even more interesting than MAUI, since it has support for more target platforms, mainly web (browsers, WebAssembly).

We are not planning to use Blazor for web development. Instead of its intertwined mixture of C#/HTML/CSS/(even JS if someone wants) I would prefer to use C#/XAML with .NETSTANDARD assemblies. It could be compared to Silverlight experience.

Regarding to WinUI 3. We have recently converted our WPF apps from NET472 to NETCOREAPP3.1. We are using DirectX, but WPF is limited to DX9 and in order to use DX11 or higher we need SwapChainPanel therefore we are going to port some of our WPF apps to WinUI 3 (or use Xaml islands, if it won't be performance costly).

We are using different UI controls from Telerik, like ScheduleView in our apps. Most interesting are those not available in WPFs PresentationFramework.dll. We also started to develop Xamarin.Forms apps (iOS, Android).

To put it all together, I envision a game changer approach from Progress's cross-platform controls, with web controls taken to account. The end goal would be to write code once in C#/XAML and run it everywhere.

I hope this will be somehow helpful for your next direction (roadmap).

 

 

Regards Tomas

[Stefan]

Thanks Tomas!

 

Regards,
Stefan
Progress Telerik

[Lance | Manager Technical Support]

Hello Thomas,

I just wanted to pop in and let you know about a side project I am working on -  Telerik.UI.for.UniversalWindowsPlatform.for.Uno. 

• Package (NuGet)
• Source Code (GitHub)

As I write this, it is at v.1.0.8 and I have everything except DataGrid and Maps working. Here's a screenshot of my testing demo:

everything from Telerik UI for UWP working in an Uno project, 

Please keep in mind that this is not an official Telerik product. Although I am a Progress employee, I am taking on this task in my spare time to help the Uno developer community.

The main current obstacles I am working to overcome are:

• The DataGrid's styles aren't being loaded
• The XAML styles aren't loaded in non-UWP platform heads.
• Map is not currently supported (due to native UWP dependencies, it may not be portable as-is)

I am working closely with the UnoPlatform developers at nventive to get past these issues.

Following Along

If you would like to follow more closely or get assistance, I highly recommend joining the UWP Community Discord. There you will find Microsoft employees, Microsoft MVPs and a large number of Windows developers actively discussing  a wide range of topics and help each other.

You will find an uno-platform channel that is closely monitored by UnoPlatform's developers and is very active. I have been providing support and keeping everyone apprised of progress on this project in that channel.

One XAML

I do understand your ultimate goal of having a 1 XAML & C# that works everywhere. I think WinUI3, Telerik UI for WinUI and UnoPlatform is what will help you achieve that goal.

In the meantime, I do see you mentioned that you are trying .NET Core 3.1. I wanted to mention .NET5 as it is almost done (expected to RTM within a month or two). If you're interested in seeing a real-world WPF app built with .NET Core (and .NET5!) and UI for WPF, visit my other pet project Media File Manager.

Note that it is also the only example that shows how to use GitHub CI/CD (Actions) to package and distribute to both SideLoad builds and Microsoft Store builds. See the Workflows folder for the YAML.

Regards,
Lance | Manager Technical Support
Progress Telerik