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I want to get into Maui and identified a first project for me. Now I am at the point where I have to decide whether to get into Blazor or XAML. My app shall have these technical requirements:

  • Own color theme
  • Responsive layout
  • Access OneDrive
  • Target Android and Windows (Linux would be fine, but thats not really supported I get)

Personal experience: I did some WPF programming years ago and also digged my nose into Blazor and Xamarin Forms (only on beginner level).

Which tech stack do you recommend to start with? XAML or Blazor?

Michael Wagner
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2 Answers2

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To be honest, impossible to say. It all very much depends on your personal preference and existing knowledge. You can do all of your requirements with both.

Looking at your list of requirements the only thing that stands out to me is responsive layout. For .NET MAUI (by that I mean XAML) you will probably have to learn a thing or 2 on how to do that, that might be more out of the box supported with Blazor because it uses Bootstrap.

The own color theme can be easily done by both the only difference being: doing it in CSS or XAML. Although with .NET MAUI you can also use CSS, but you might be missing some (minor) functionality. One thing that I'm not really sure about from the top of my head is how Blazor goes about light/dark theme in .NET MAUI. I expect it to just work, but that might be something to double-check.

The only thing "web" still about .NET MAUI Blazor (or Blazor Hybrid) is the UI. The HTML gets rendered and looks consistent across all platforms. The functionality is the same. You can still access all the device functionality and implement everything you want, including accessing OneDrive.

Of course, it is still a web view and users might notice that and find the user experience less than with a native UI app.

Hope this helps anything!

Gerald Versluis
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If you go with Blazor then you you should be able to turn it into a web app if the need for that ever arises. That's quite a neat perk.

I've only just gotten into it and wrote a little incremental game skeleton last weekend. I've never used blazor or razor before, I've never done web development, and all things considered it was very easy and comfortable to learn.

Fabs
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