Discussion: MAUI controls

[ghost]

Every platform has basic controls such as buttons and switches, but more complex controls like NavigationView or TabView are either only available in WinUI or don't function in the same way.

Wouldn't it make sense to decouple the non-primitive controls from WinUI and move them over to MAUI? This way you could actually get them on every platform.

[mdtauk]

Android has a few concepts that would be an equivalent. Also the NavigationView can be orientated to a top bar.

WinUI could enable bottom placement to work with iOS and Android navigation.

But at some point custom Xaml WinUI controls will need to be created to match common patterns from macOS, iOS, Android etc

In some circumstances, it may be appropriate to create versions of WinUI controls that work on the other platforms too

[ghost]

I think it would be best if MAUI created its own controls based on common primitives found on each platform, like Stackpanel or Grid.
For example in dotnet/maui#542 controls like DataGrid are mentioned, which may not exist natively in any of the platforms. If they're built on WinUI only (#1500), they'll be useless for the other platforms.

[mdtauk]

I think it would be best if MAUI created its own controls based on common primitives found on each platform, like Stackpanel or Grid.
For example in dotnet/maui#542 controls like DataGrid are mentioned, which may not exist natively in any of the platforms. If they're built on WinUI only (#1500), they'll be useless for the other platforms.

This is where Fluent UI plays it's part. Creating controls for Web, Android, iOS, etc. And design tokens shared among all of these and WinUI, allow for customisations like corner radius, Shadow, colours, metrics etc.

MAUI can support these as a shared set of controls, whilst still allowing native controls and rendering where developers do not want to use the same pattern for certain platforms.

There is already a Cross Platform effort going on with Fluent UI, to standardise basic primitives like Button and Text

[omikhailov]

No way, not at the cost of Windows ecosystem which is already almost ruined. This would greatly slow down development, plus, cross-platform controls would have limited feature set, poor quality and design. Current workflow, when one team polishes a library for Windows, and another one uses it in their cross-platform framework, makes more sense. If they didn't create full copy of NavigationView or TabView, perhaps they had reasons, especially keeping in mind that all major platforms are proprietary. As competitors they may use common primitive controls like buttons and text, but have different requirements for concepts of higher order, like navigation, layout, design or input. And if Windows would only have controls implementing common subset of such requirements without advanced features, it would be just incompetitive.