Create installable artifacts for Blazor hybrid desktop apps for Windows and macOS

[danroth27]

Summary

As a [developer], I want to [create installable artifacts for my Blazor hybrid desktop app] so that [I can distribute my app].”

Note: This is a proposed experience for .NET 6 and not yet committed.

[ghost]

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We're moving this issue to the Next sprint planning milestone for future evaluation / consideration. We will evaluate the request when we are planning the work for the next milestone. To learn more about what to expect next and how this issue will be handled you can read more about our triage process here.

[odhanson]

Hey. We had some discussions about Apple Silicon yesterday and this story came up. Just wanted to clarify that in order to release an application to the Apple Store, these applications need to be universal (i.e. the native binaries need to be universal supporting both x64 and arm64). So we might need a story here for publishing with a osx-x64-arm64 rid or something like that.

[mkArtakMSFT]

@rconard I don't think this should be tracked in this repo, as it's a broader work. Is there any other issue tracking this we can dupe this with?

[danroth27]

Scoping out Linux for .NET 6. We expect Linux support to come later.

[SommerEngineering]

@danroth27 Can we get another issue i.e. user story for Linux then? The related epic dotnet/aspnetcore#27217 links to this issue with the title: "Create installable artifacts for Blazor hybrid desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux". When Linux was scoped out, we Linux users would need a new issue to follow 😉

[tmds]

Scoping out Linux for .NET 6. We expect Linux support to come later.

@danroth27 why? are there some specific challenges to make this work on Linux? Anything community could help with?

[danroth27]

It's really a scoping decision for .NET MAUI in .NET 6. .NET MAUI is an evolution of Xamarin Forms, which currently has official support for Android, iOS, and UWP. .NET MAUI will add Windows desktop support with WinUI, and macOS support. Linux just didn't fit for .NET 6, but we absolutely still plan to do it. Blazor will run wherever .NET MAUI runs.

Adding @davidortinau from the .NET MAUI team in case he wants to add anything.

[pjmagee]

Would this also include things like Auto update features?

[Eilon]

Hopefully there isn't much, or any, Blazor-specific work here. The work is to verify that MAUI publishing scenarios work equally will with Blazor on all platforms. Separately we would need to make sure that Windows-specific publishing works for WPF and WinForms Blazor apps, such as ClickOnce, and Windows Application Packaging Projects.

[jfversluis]

Also see #4329

[ErikApption]

Just looked at the roadmap for .net 7 - will this work item and dotnet/runtime#44736 help to develop native MAUI mac apps without using Mac Catalyst? We have ported part of our app to MAUI but we are stuck with Electron because it is not straightforward to use all native MacOS features through Catalyst.

[danroth27]

Hi @ErikApption

will this work item and dotnet/runtime#44736 help to develop native MAUI mac apps without using Mac Catalyst?

No, .NET MAUI's support for macOS is based on Catalyst and there aren't any plans to change that as far as I know.

We have ported part of our app to MAUI but we are stuck with Electron because it is not straightforward to use all native MacOS features through Catalyst.

I'd like to understand better what Catalyst limitations you're running into. Can you share more details on that?

[mkArtakMSFT]

Closing as this is tracked separately.

[TanayParikh]

Here's the Mac Catalyst publish tracking issue: #5197