Background story
I am developing in dotnet every single day. For the last 18 months (approx since August 2021) I have been doing Blazor front end and for the last month I took the chance on MAUI as my PWA was not living up to my expectations. All this is is working with my dotnet REST API.
MAC is my development environment by choice. Long story short – I haven’t looked back since I tried MAC hardware in 2014. I used to work with Paralell – using Windows to develop on my Mac but since dotnet became available on Mac – I started to work exclusively on macOs.
I have done most of the development with VS Code – as VS 2022 wasn’t work ready but moving into MAUI and mobile development this is no longer an option.
The problemssss ….
Microsoft continues to deliver versions of Visual Studio for Mac – and from late last fall they started giving it names like Release Candidate and even Release – even though one could not rename or move files properly.
The whole time the parsing of Razor files has resulted in the infamous spinning wheel of death – for up to 52 seconds (the longest I measured) when just editing HTML tags.
The release notes continues to list fancy stuff which is of no value to the every day developer until the basic things are fixes and we can work 60 minutes of our hour – not work 20 minutes and wait 40 minutes.
The latest (preview) release (I also use the stable release channel) features an unusable project reference editor – meaning that the list of project references seems to have no connection what-so-ever with the contents of the actual XML in the project file – listing the project references the compiler is actually working with. This cost me several hours yesterday (Sunday) trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on – the compiler complaining about missing and incorrect references.
The problem
For me – the problem is quite obvious – there is nobody on the Microsoft Test Team actually working on real live projects using VS 2022 for Mac – the bugs they release – bear every indication that nobody at Microsoft is actually doing real Blazor and Maui development using this tool. They might be updating the demos and testing out some simple stuff – but nobody is actually doing real live refactoring with VS 2022 for Mac.
Please, please …
… Microsoft – make your development team use this product – we are dying of productivity losses over here in the real world. The excitement about Maui will evaporate quickly if it cannot be developed properly on Mac. Front end developers don’t work on Windows – they work on Mac and MAUI will never gain traction if you don’t fix these basic things properly.