Today we are announcing the retirement of the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Visual Studio for Mac 17.6 will continue to be supported for another 12 months, until August 31st, 2024, with servicing updates for security issues and updated platforms from Apple.
Is this supposed to give me confidence in .Net MAU?
Well at this point, don’t trust any framework Microsoft pushes. They told everyone UWP was the future for Windows after WPF, then stopped for WinUI and the app SDK…
The problem with UWP is that nobody liked or wanted it, so obviously it died. Developers got locked into a walled garden, Xbox users saw no benefit (until recently with emulators, but I digress), Windows phone users practically didn’t exist to build apps for, and PC gamers got the real short end of the stick with everything becoming a buggy, locked-down, performance-hampering, feature-lacking mess.
Outside of letting Microsoft half-ass port some Xbox titles to PC, it was pretty much useless.
I have started using Avalonia, and even though I am still learning, I am very satisfied with it. There are growing pains obviously, but as you said, I have no confidence in Microsoft UI frameworks.
MAUI is an open source project that’s a part of the .NET Foundation. One would hope that instills a bit more confidence, but I have yet to see any projects actually using it. Regardless, it’s forkable and permissively licensed (MIT), so the lifetime is theoretically indefinite.