How to contribute to MAUI Development/Bug fixing

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm developing some apps with .NET MAUI. I'm facing some issues related for example with CollectionViews and Labels. I would really enjoy being able to see the root cause of this issues in MAUI source code and try to fix them and contribute to the official repository.

So my question is if it's possible to clone MAUI source code and run my app using that cloned source code. Also would be very cool if I could debug MAUI source code while running my app. That way probably I would quickly find the errors and fix them.

Is this possible? Am I saying some nonsense 😅 (hope not)?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Answer 1

its an open source project and you can build your on copy, and do pull requests (contribute fixes).

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

for android Maui build c# wrappers for all the native java objects in the android sdk. for any c# code called by java, java wrappers for C# are also required.

for IOS, only native code is supported. So Maui must compile all C# to native. the objective-c entry points are used, so p-invoke and c++ marshaling are used to create wrappers for the IOS sdks. There are some tools to help generate these wrappers. While on the roadmap, there is no direct swift support. swift code must be objective-c callable.

there are major difference in the native UI support. for instance IOS List views have builtin support for selection, drag and drop animation, and move list object support. Android List Views don't. When there is this much difference in the native toolkit features, Maui designers need to decide what features the Maui CollectionViews will support.

for debugging the remote native debuggers are used (which know nothing about C#), and VS debugger must translate native addresses and symbols to the C# source code.

note: once you learn enough native android and iOS coding to be able to code/debug the Maui sdk, you may decide you no longer need Maui.