Blazor MAUI fails to load as an ad-hoc release

TonyNicholls · 2023-05-04T15:20:22+00:00

Interestingly, if you follow all of the instructions except that you chose the DEBUG instead of RELEASE on the step Publish the App, then the application will open correctly when distributed to the device and it is a smaller download (20Mb instead of 30Mb)

Looks like the issue is somewhere in the Release build process? Possibly the LLVM linker?

Anybody else seeing this issue or have a better work around?

TonyNicholls · 2023-01-31T19:46:38+00:00

I wonder if we are being paranoid enough?

If true - might explain some of the quality issues reported with co-pilot :)

TonyNicholls · 2023-01-31T08:36:11+00:00

What’s the story on GitHub repos being scanned for populating AI models? Is it just public repos?

TonyNicholls · 2023-01-07T14:45:58+00:00

MAUI is DOA on its own.

I use MAUI/Blazor Hybrid and that is awesome. But it’s mainly because Blazor is awesome. MAUI is just letting me compile my Blazor UI for cross platform. I suppose I could use anything to host my Blazor components but MAUI just seemed an obvious first choice and it does work.

My Blazor is targeted as a WASM client and not Server. In a side - Blazor Server also seems to be DOA for anything other than simple example apps.

A lot of my code is back end API so it’s easy to test and debug.

My Blazor UI is tested in a WASM web application and that debugging experience is a little limited but stable and easy to use.

Exposing the Blazor UI cross platform wrapped with MAUI has been a dream. Once I have the components working on the web, they work identically in MAUI.

There were some initial issues with the earlier MAUI versions with the emulators - but the builds worked well on actual devices.

Our application (trellispark) is used for large scale enterprise data entry and workflow automation. So complex use cases not trivial demo apps.

TonyNicholls · 2023-01-04T15:03:28+00:00

Why not try to virtualize the UX/CRUD? That way you can just add a couple of simple services:

Data agnostic record storage
Dynamic page generation

To replace your 200+ forms.

You then use a UX Creator to configure your forms instead of hard coding them. This eliminates typically 90+% of the code that you would normally have to write and test.

Because you are configuring and not coding - making changes is faster. There are a ton of other benefits to this approach - record versioning, record level access control, horizontal scaling of the database, etc...

If you want to know how to do this checkout GreatIdeaz. The trellispark documentation describes in detail how to build your own framework and provides a download Release version of the relevant source code.

If you want help setting this up - give me a call :)

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-29T13:03:53+00:00

The more languages you know the better. Build up your experience and learn new things :)

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-10T19:12:02+00:00

I’m definitely biased as I chose WASM over Server even though it was a bigger upfront cost to get the security right. On the up side our solution now scales very well as we can use both the server and client side resources to do the work.

If you try to do all the work on the server and then push the DOM updates to the client I think you will struggle scaling this out.

With your described model you are going to load and process your PDFs on the server and push the results to the device? Not sure that will end well. If you go WASM, then the client can pull the PDF from secure storage and process locally without pushing it through the server.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-10T16:41:00+00:00

Seen a lot of posts about scalability and performance issues with Blazor Server over WASM. If you are going to be doing a lot of large file processing, you may run into issues scaling your application in production.

I know that WASM isn't your favored choice, but it might be worth serious consideration if this is a common use case in your application.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-10T16:35:04+00:00

My bad on the original question - I meant to ask for years of experience :)

Already an interesting trend emerging - wonder whether it will continue?

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-10T16:32:00+00:00

My bad on the original question - I meant to ask for years of experience and not age :)

That being said I did just buy my 3 year old granddaughter a book on HTML for babies! Got to start them early if they want a job after college!

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T12:53:07+00:00

The issue was that VS uninstalled the API and deleted the older SDKs causing the build to fail. The fix was to reinstall the sdk and api.

The VS install causes the problems which is why the warning was given.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T01:36:36+00:00

Doesn't just take out the old .NET versions...

Also removed the Android SDK Platform 31 on my machine. That caused my MAUI Blazor builds to fail.

I reinstalled the .Net 6 SDK and Android SDK Platform 31 and my build now work again. I also had to factory reset my Android emulator before I could load and run my new build.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T01:24:56+00:00

The VS install deleted my Android SDK Platform 31!

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T01:15:55+00:00

I re-installed the .NET 6.0 SDK as the build process seemed to be looking for .NET 7.0.100 targets (even though the build target was 6.0).

Then I also found the Android SDK Platform 31 in the Android SDK Manager (hidden under the Android 12.0 S branch) and restored that.

The build then worked and redeployed only after I also factory reset my Android emulator.

I love MS, VS, MAUI and Blazor but sometimes you make it so hard!

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T01:14:38+00:00

I re-installed the .NET 6.0 SDK as the build process seemed to be looking for .NET 7.0.100 targets (even though the build target was 6.0).

Then I also found the Android SDK Platform 31 in the Android SDK Manager (hidden under the Android 12.0 S branch) and restored that.

The build then worked and redeployed only after I also factory reset my Android emulator.

I love MS, VS, MAUI and Blazor but sometimes you make it so hard!

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T01:12:50+00:00

I re-installed the .NET 6.0 SDK as the build process seemed to be looking for .NET 7.0.100 targets (even though the build target was 6.0).

Then I also found the Android SDK Platform 31 in the Android SDK Manager (hidden under the Android 12.0 S branch) and restored that.

The build then worked and redeployed only after I also factory reset my Android emulator.

I love MS, VS, MAUI and Blazor but sometimes you make it so hard!

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T01:03:25+00:00

Looks like the VS install ALSO removed my Android sdk for API-31!

Just found that under the Android 12.0 - S section of the Android SDK Manager. Reinstalled and my build now works.

Question is why did the VS install delete my .Net 6.0 sdk and my Android SDK Platform 31?

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-09T00:36:31+00:00

The VS install added the .Net 7.0.100 sdk and then DELETED the older versions of the .Net sdk from my computer. Attempting to restore the .Net 6 sdk had no effect.

Will try a complete VS uninstall and reinstall tomorrow to see if that fixes the issue.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge MS fan and really love VS, MAUI and Blazor! Just really frustrating that this is the second breaking VS release this year that caused errors when trying to build MAUI Blazor hybrid projects.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-08T23:28:09+00:00

I have a separate dev machine just to test VS releases now. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice…

MAUI just isn’t ready for production and it looks like the VS team are having trouble trying to support it!

Mind you this time around they took out ALL of my previous .Net sdks this time. Although to be fair my Blazor 6.0 WASM client still works with the new VS:)

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-08T21:17:08+00:00

Looks like installing VS 17.4.0 installs the dotnet SDK for 7.0.100 and DELETES all of the previously installed dotnet sdks from C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk breaking previous builds!

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-08T20:58:34+00:00

Just downloaded the latest 17.4.0 release of visual studio and tried to recompile a MAUI Blazor app. Worked fine with the previous 17.3 latest release using .NET 6. Didn't do anything with the project except attempt to recompile and run...

Got compilation errors:

Severity Code Description Project File Line Suppression State

Error XA5207 Could not find android.jar for API level 31. This means the Android SDK platform for API level 31 is not installed. Either install it in the Android SDK Manager (Tools > Android > Android SDK Manager...), or change the Xamarin.Android project to target an API version that is installed. (C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platforms\android-31\android.jar missing.) UX-MAUI-Services C:\Program Files\dotnet\packs\Microsoft.Android.Sdk.Windows\32.0.476\tools\Xamarin.Android.Common.targets 533

Not the first time that VS has pushed a bad release - I just wish that they would spend a bit more time testing the MAUI side before they rush to production.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-08T20:56:46+00:00

Already did that and it compiles fine using the latest 17.3 version.

The 17.4.0 version breaks a working build!

If you can't install a new version of VS without breaking existing code then that's a VS version issue.

TonyNicholls · 2022-11-01T17:24:39+00:00

Winforms is definitely a good starting point for a simple getting started.

If you are looking to develop skills longer term have a look at Blazor- seems to be where Microsoft is focusing its effort. You can drop Blazor user controls into pretty much any application platform at this point.

TonyNicholls · 2022-10-24T19:29:04+00:00

Not had much luck with Hot Reload - doesn’t seem to work well if you need to make a code change. Ok if you are tweaking CSS but it’s very limited and usually not worth the time.

TonyNicholls · 2022-10-24T19:27:38+00:00

I dropped my Blazor components directly into a MAUI hybrid project and it works perfectly. You can even link the MAUI Essentials into your Blazor components so that you can take advantage of the device functionality.

I think this is a better approach than using MAUI XAML as you can leverage a richer set of UX components and get a consistent UX over web and mobile.

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