Going from Xamarin.Mac to .NET MAUI mac catalyst, differences between UIKit and AppKit

Question

Going from Xamarin.Mac to .NET MAUI mac catalyst, differences between UIKit and AppKit

noobsoftware 251

I have a bunch of code written in AppKit and Foundation in my Xamarin.Mac applications that i want to transfer over to .NET MAUI but there seems to be a large difference between AppKit and UIKit, firstly i don't really understand why AppKit has been abandoned, it is my understanding that UIKit is from iOS so it seems limited in some aspects. Specifically i would like to modify the appearance of the application's window. But changing the windows opacity (setting opaque to false and changing alpha value) seems to have no effect at all. I am able to change the background color of the window but cannot set things like: NSWindowStyle.FullSizeContentView. Is it possible to change from UIKit fo AppKit. If not is it possible to alter the appearance of the window? Specifically i want to add what was an NSVisualEffectView with blending mode for the background of the window with the items behind it, the counterpart seems to be UIVisualEffectView but it does not have any of the same properties such as view.BlendingMode = NSVisualEffectBlendingMode.BehindWindow;

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Yonglun Liu (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 50,126 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2022-11-10T01:03:29.647+00:00

So far, MAUI does not support migration from xamarin.mac, you could refer toMigrating-from-Xamarin.Forms-(Preview).

Therefore, there is no better way than to manually replace the relevant Mac APIs.
noobsoftware 251 Reputation points

2022-11-12T16:45:00.267+00:00

According to this article: https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-access-the-appkit-api-from-mac-catalyst-apps-2184527020b5

This can be solved in Xcode, however in visual studio mac there are only the options of adding Cocoa xamarin project, is there any possibility of doing the same thing in Visual Studio? If not will there ever be added the option of adding Cocoa MAUI project?

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Yonglun Liu (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 50,126 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2022-11-10T01:03:29.647+00:00

So far, MAUI does not support migration from xamarin.mac, you could refer toMigrating-from-Xamarin.Forms-(Preview).

Therefore, there is no better way than to manually replace the relevant Mac APIs.
noobsoftware 251 Reputation points

2022-11-12T16:45:00.267+00:00

According to this article: https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-access-the-appkit-api-from-mac-catalyst-apps-2184527020b5

This can be solved in Xcode, however in visual studio mac there are only the options of adding Cocoa xamarin project, is there any possibility of doing the same thing in Visual Studio? If not will there ever be added the option of adding Cocoa MAUI project?

Answer 1

Wenyan Zhang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 36,436 Microsoft External Staff

Hi @noobsoftware ,

Xamarin.Forms ran on the Mac using Xamarin.Mac (Cocoa App) as the mac platform project so since it was a Xamarin.Mac app, it had access to everything a native Mac app had access to.
.NET MAUI apps can be written for macOS 10.15 or higher, using Mac Catalyst. Catalyst apps are granted access to a part of AppKit in the SDK by Apple, so you could not access the full API with MAUI.

I read the article, the author used a swift third-party library to access hidden and private API. You could try to Bind iOS Swift libraries.

As YonglunLiu-MSFT said, some migration tools are not ready yet. And your main purpose is to change the appearance of window and may need Mac Platform API Support, you can join the discussion, or create a feature request at https://github.com/dotnet/maui , thanks for your understanding.

Best Regards,
Wenyan Zhang

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noobsoftware 251 Reputation points

2022-11-14T14:49:02.653+00:00

Thanks for you response, i would like to go forward with this idea but it seems really expensive to create a support ticket. Are you sure that this method would actually work? I'm not sure i want to pay the amount needed for the support ticket if this might not work out.
noobsoftware 251 Reputation points

2022-11-19T17:44:23.243+00:00

I've been able to recode everything i need in objective-c and make an objective-c library, next i'm attempting to create a bindings, which presumably has to be a .net maui mac catalyst binding project, which builds successfully but i'm not sure if that is the correct approach. Because when adding a reference from a .net maui project to the mac catalyst binding i get the following error:

/usr/local/share/dotnet/packs/Microsoft.MacCatalyst.Sdk/15.4.2372/targets/Xamarin.Shared.Sdk.targets(3,3): Error: clang++ exited with code 1:
ld: building for Mac Catalyst, but linking in dylib built for macOS, file 'obj/Debug/net7.0-maccatalyst/maccatalyst-x64/nativelibraries/libnoob_objc.dylib' for architecture x86_64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation) (test)

The error being on the dylib that the binding is constructed on. I'm wondering if you can point me in the right direction? Should this be the correct approach or will any dylib containing Appkit ultimately not work? If so, does it make sense to include "dynamic" (the swift library) in my objective-c code and build that as a library?

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Going from Xamarin.Mac to .NET MAUI mac catalyst, differences between UIKit and AppKit

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