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App Center .NET Maui Support #3333
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Hi there, One thing that consistently holds me back making updates to my current Xamarin.Forms solution is MS App Center support, as this is a key part of my dev ops and where all my apps are built and distributed. For example, C# 9 support has only just appeared despite C# 10 being here, and the latest version of Mono is only supported via a build script. I am very nervous about what will happen with Maui, and fear this will be the big thing that stops me updating my apps. Is the .NET Maui team working with the App Center team to ensure support and if so how will this look for us? Thanks! |
Replies: 45 comments 66 replies
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Currently I CANNOT get it to work with .Net Maui RC |
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This is a huge concern of mine too. I guess that, since MS plan to move DevOps parts from Azure to GitHub, there might be plans for doing the same for appcenter. However, AppCenter has been more or less an abandoned project for ~2 years. Feels a bit sad, we don't get any information about the current plans. Of course plans can change, but right now, we have no idéa if MS plans to have a cross-platform DevOps environment at all in the future. If no such plans exist, it's about time to start looking at alternatives. If it's just around the corner, we can probably hold on until it's in place. |
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Hard to say. I'm not surprised that current AppCenter doesn't support MAUI. The only way to compile a MAUI app is to use technologies in preview and I don't expect a bunch of preview technologies to be pushed into AppCenter used for production deployments. I wouldn't be surprised if at some time AppCenter gets rolled into Azure DevOps as there is a lot of overlap there, or perhaps AppCenter will be left as just an automated testing tool. Regardless, it seems unlikely MAUI will work in AppCenter until VS 2022 is released. |
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Would be really nice if Microsoft would offer some guidance on AppCenter. |
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Anyone hear anything? I asked AppCenter support directly in my account there. Will report back if I hear anything. |
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Did you get any answer? |
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I have the feeling AppCenter has been on the way out for years, no new features for a long time now and this could be the final straw. I see a lot of recommendations to use GitHub actions for build and distribute, but it looks very clunky compared to AppCenter. However I get the feeling this might be the only way to go. |
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AppCenter doesn't even support .net 6 for starters. |
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AppCenter is DEAD |
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As indicated by the linked tweet, a new package has been released that is compatible with .NET 6 and thus .NET MAUI. Further investments are being made in App Center as of now. So no, App Center is not dead. |
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Well Preview App center for MAUI is out to be fair, https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AppCenter/5.0.0-preview.1 But I still think app center needs a lot of focus from the MS team. |
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Investments are being made, more information should be out soon on that. |
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Publishing Maui to Android and apk file works great for testing, but not with IOS and ipa file.. Can anyone step-by-step / reference to a maui-ios-app-testing guide ? with or without using github ? |
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BUMP ...
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Hey Steph :) These references worked for me: IOS, generating the ipa file + going through approvals with apple team etc. could be frustrating but it did finally worked ! I hope this could help you / anyone Cheers, Ben |
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Either make AppCenter work or we need to move on as a community ... "hacks" aren't the way |
💯 |
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Like seriously… |
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BUMP .... |
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Microsoft is forcing people to consider different technologies like React Native or Flutter. MAUI and AppCenter seem like they are going nowhere. So sad. |
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I switched jobs recently and they have a Xamarin investment ... missing items like maps and AppCenter support made them decide on Flutter for the next rev of the product ... it's embarrassing what Microsoft has let happen I hold out hope that someone will wake up ... @jamesmontemagno @maddymontaquila @davidortinau |
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If anyone is interested there is this article by Sweeky which is cool but I don't want to move to Azure ... |
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I've been using devops + appcenter for years, gives you much more flexibility than using just appcenter |
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awesome ... I'm just not interested ... |
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There hasn't been an AppCenter blog post since August 16, 2022 |
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Can anyone on this thread recommend a build and deploy server alternative to AppCenter ? |
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@wisdeom , @jamesmontemagno , @maddymontaquila , @davidortinau, @jfversluis AppCenter support .... so who is the PM + Engineering Team he speaks of ?
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I have to respectfully disagree ...
All that is happening is people are pointing to different locations and
nothing is actually being done.
…On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 8:49 AM Jihye Eom ***@***.***> wrote:
@stephenhauck <https://github.com/stephenhauck> Though I do not have the
exact ETA for .NET MAUI Build support in App Center at the moment, App
Center team is aware of your request. Leaving my comment to let you know we
have heard your voice and to share the related post in the App Center
repository. microsoft/appcenter#2360
<microsoft/appcenter#2360>
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@stephenhauck Right now, I have no plans to switch the error logging/analytics from appcenter since I don't really think there are many other pieces of software that support xamarin/maui errors (thankfully the sdk team at least added MAUI support for the nuget package recently) I don't personally have huge experience with github actions but we do use it some. As for azure, honestly whats frustrating about us continually being told to use that is im 99% sure thats what appcenter is based on. They probably just use the same azure pipelines behind the scenes, just with a fancy interface on top, which makes me think it wouldn't be a stretch to support it in appcenter. Its all a shame, we chose xamarin years ago because of .net/c# experience and i would definitely prefer to continue with it. |
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I hear ya it's an excellent tool and I started it back in 2012 when you had to pay for it and it wasn't cheap ! All they have to do is add an Azure Build option for MAUI (support it) and charge me like $10 a month INSIDE the simplicity of AppCenter and we are good ! But alas .. it seems no one at Microsoft actually uses or tries to use their own products ... |
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Microsoft is rather famous for eating their own dog food, so I suspect they very much use their own products. Except that it is likely Azure DevOps they are using for this. I agree that AppCenter is much simpler, but the AppCenter build services represent a duplicate product to what they have in ADO and to some extent GitHub. My guess is that when they start streamlining their product offerings, it won't be AppCenter that wins. AppCenter still seems like a good choice for automated mobile testing, crashes and analytics; all of which can be used without build services. If I were looking to where to go for build services with a .Net MAUI project, AppCenter wouldn't be my first choice. |
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@Bowman74 it would be the place to go if it has been successfully for many years .... I used to pay for Xamarin since back in 2012 .... guess it's dead and over ... time to move to Flutter like everyone else I guess |
I don't know man, over the past 20 years I've only gotten the impression that MS uses C# for anything relatively recently and even now I'm pretty sure they don't use Xamarin for any of their apps on iOS or Android. I can't think of anything they used Winforms for, I think I remember hearing VS is WPF but VS Code is electron, Hell it was only recently they multi-threaded VS, remember how the UI always froze up when it was doing Intellisense or saves? Most of the desktop office stuff was C++, it's hard to say now, maybe UWP? I don't think they ever used Silverlight, they just let us look like chumps for advocating it for web and WP7 then pulled the rug out from under us. They abandoned L2S almost instantly and then ignored EF for a decade while it became a joke. They might be using asp.net MVC for some of their web stuff in the last couple years but I know there is a bunch of Angular, React, etc in there too. If they were using Blazor for anything the auth setup wouldn't be the mess that it is and I'm sure they never used Identity 1 or 2. It seems like their research and AI stuff is leaning more to Python than C# or even C++. I could go on and on and it has always broken my heart because I think C# is the best language out there and the company that created it has barely nurtured it during it's long history and it's lead to a lot of people leaving the ecosystem as a whole. Steve Ballmer was wrong about a lot of things but he was dead on when he was dancing all sweaty around that stage all those years ago singing, "Developers, developers, developers, developers!!" I've been writing C# code professionally for about as long as it's existed and I can't think of the last time I ever thought, "Microsoft is really trying hard to make it easy to write great software for their platforms." |
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found this in case anyone stumbles onto this thread ... https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/flutter-for/xamarin-forms-devs |
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I've done a fair amount of work with Flutter. While it doesn't create native UIs it has one thing that I find very, very nice. It is really stable because of that. |
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@Bowman74 yep .. I was just informed that this is not the correct place to ask about AppCenter and MAUI builds in another thread Seems people are more concerned about "where" to complain about software not working instead of making it work ... @davidortinau you need to close this thread too ... |
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@wisdeom , @jamesmontemagno , @maddymontaquila , @davidortinau, @jfversluis Anyone .... |
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Anyone ? |
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@DiogoDeAlmeida This has been open since Nov 10, 2021 ... still nothing .. we have all been patient and as respectful as possible considering the criticality of AppCenter in the Xamarin / MAUI ecosystem .....I think they should just close it so we can tell management it's over ... |
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App Center support is another thing holding us back from migrating from Xamarin.Forms to MAUI. So sad to see what has happened to the once-awesome Xamarin product. Classical Microsoft and front-end tech. |
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This is why I am leaving MAUI behind in favor of Flutter ... |
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I used https://codemagic.io/ to build and distribute to stores. It just works. |
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Yep .. I'm using Codemagic for my Flutter apps too ... |
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Thanks guys for the tip :) |
I also switched to sentry, but it's not at the level of appcenter crash yet. And does not work on iOS. |
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It's possible to build and distribute MAUI apps via App Center. |
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So will you share them ? |
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See microsoft/appcenter#2121 (comment) The basic idea is that you have .NET 7 SDK already installed on AppCenter build agents and thus can build the app via With that approach, one can build a Flutter app as well. Of course, it's probably easier to use some other tool rather than do a bunch of workarounds in AppCenter :) |
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That's my thought .. if I can't build in AppCenter and have crashlytics then why bother ... |
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I'm happy with codemagic.io, it builds very fast, it deploys to stores very fast and without any issue, and it push symbol files to appcenter crash so I can still use it. And it's free for enough build minutes per month. I compared with github actions: using a mac with github costs x2 in minutes, and the number of build minutes is so low that in 2 builds you use 100% of your free time. Plus it takes twice the time to build the same code base. |
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I am using app center just for listing the maui apps. For building the app, I am using a azure devops pipeline. In the azure pipeline I am able to build for iOS, Android and Windows. So, I set a pipeline for generate the artifacts (the app packages) and set a release pipeline that sends the package to the app center. |
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Hey @MarcosCostaDev , do you know of a tutorial out there that describes how to set up the release pipeline that sends the package to the app center (or could you outline the steps you took)? I've got a pipline that builds MAUI in Azure Devops, but I'm missing that last piece that connects the dots between Devops and AppCenter. I'm convinced AppCenter Build is dead, but would still like to use AppCenter for distribution/crashalytics etc. |
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@somoreingold the documentation is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/tasks/reference/app-center-distribute-v3?view=azure-pipelines You can add this task Example: - task: AppCenterDistribute@3
displayName: Deploy iOS IPA
inputs:
serverEndpoint: 'AppCenter'
appSlug: 'MyOrg/MyApp'
appFile: '$(build.binariesDirectory)/Release/**/*.ipa'
releaseNotesOption: 'input'
releaseNotesInput: 'My Release notes here'
destinationType: 'groups'
distributionGroupId: 9f3af049-9f3af049-9f3af049-9f3af049-9f3af049; 9f3af049-9f3af049-9f3af049-a513-9f3af049;
isSilent: false |
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Why not use AppCenter for crashlytics ?Stephen On May 9, 2023, at 6:32 PM, Benjamin Mayrargue ***@***.***> wrote:
Thanks guys for the tip :)
After re-evaluating, I'm starting 3 new projects and using MAUI + CodeMagic.io
I also switched to sentry, but it's not at the level of appcenter crash yet. And does not work on iOS.
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I did, but it was not reporting crashes I experienced on iOS apps from TestFlight. So I suppose it's working erratically now too. Sentry did report them, even unsymbolicated. Something related to system.text.json, to fix it I switched to the beta version of this nuget. |
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I guess there is still no support for AppCenter in MAUI? Following Gerald's yt video (he's using 5 preview), but when using .net 7 and version 5.0.2, Microsoft.AppCenter.Crashes just won't work. |
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After a number of restarts of the emulator, vs, computer, cleans and rebuilds, I now have App Center (both diagnostics and analytics) up and running fine. It does work with MAUI! |
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Just use react to load your Blazor app, once it's ready switch to MAUI.Blazor |
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This way you can publish to any where |
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Well i am not able to get appcenter crashes to work with iOS or MacCatalyst. Seems to work fine with WinUI3 I get the following error when i run System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for 'Microsoft.AppCenter.Utils.ApplicationLifecycleHelperDesktop' threw an exception. ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies. This is running on MacOS with .net7 Any Ideas? |
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It's possible to build and distribute MAUI apps via App Center. Any Ideas??? it says "We couldn’t find any Xamarin Android projects in your branch." |
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❌ Build ✅ Distribute For building you'd need to use something else (e.g. Azure Pipelines), and then you can easily distribute to AppCenter. See my other comment #3333 (reply in thread) |
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About damn time they gave an update on it at least. I was hoping they would keep the bug/analytics support though. |
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I'm just glad we have a concrete answer at this point; now we know what direction MS is taking with regards to MAUI. Unfortunately, my team can't view this decision by MS in a vacuum. It is becoming harder, not easier to see the benefits of MAUI with the shutdown of AppCenter, VS for Mac, and 3k open issues (while Xamarin's EOL is 6 weeks from today). |
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@somoreingold Totally fair |
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I'm not surprised. I was thinking they were replacing it with Azure DevOps but it is looking more and more like all of the git and build functionality (and quite frankly a lot of the project management stuff) is being disfavored in Azure Dev Ops and finding its way into Github. It had been one of my most popular Linked In Learning classes for a long time too. |
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I'm Using Rider more than VS Code and doing MAUI and the Uno Platform ... |
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I use Rider and VS Code and Codemagic for CI / CD On Mar 14, 2024, at 3:55 PM, Will ***@***.***> wrote:
I gave up a long time ago. I've been using MS products long enough to see when the writing is already on the wall... Been burned too many times. At least now it's official. Been using Sentry for crashes which is very good, not found a suitable replacement for analytics. Building on my local machine which doesn't have fancy CI but I don't need it, it's reliable and free. All within Rider as VS for Mac is also no longer a thing 🤷🏻♂️
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and others
👇
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/retirement