Support for MAUI runtimes in ASP.NET Core?

Hey,

I apologize in advance if this is not the correct place to ask this, but I didn’t find any better one. Feel free to move this issue if appropriate.

For testing purposes, in MAUI net6.0-android project I’ve tried to reference other project of mine targetting net6.0 which is a library. I didn’t have any issues doing so, but during compilation I’ve stumbled upon following error:

Error NETSDK1082 There is no Microsoft.AspNetCore.App runtime package available for the specified RuntimeIdentifier “android-x86”

If I understand this right, I can reference standard net6.0 projects because Microsoft.NETCore.App.Runtime.Mono.android-x86 exists and is usable, at least I successfully did that with example net6.0 library. However, I’d like to reference a library that has actual ASP.NET Core elements (Kestrel web server, API with MVC etc), which according to the error is impossible because it can’t find a required android-x86 runtime, which seems to be correct as of today.

Now I apologize if I’m trying to do some extreme stupidity, or I don’t understand something, but I wanted to verify whether it’d be possible to “convert” existing CLI project of mine which uses Kestrel and API controllers into an Android MAUI app that could start the “backend” part on the target machine, with some nice frontend utilizing those API endpoints over HTTP. I’m testing this in .NET 6.0 preview 6 if it matters.

Is this possible/planned? Or perhaps I’m doing something horribly wrong?

In any case, thank you in advance for answering, I appreciate it.

[danroth27]

Hi folks. I’d like to collect some more details on the specific scenarios for using ASP.NET Core in a mobile app. So far from the feedback in this issue I’ve identified two scenarios:

• Building a mobile app as a locally hosted web app (https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/35077#issue-962146241)
• IPC between apps using gRPC (https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/35077#issuecomment-908238983)

Anything else?

[ramondeklein]

I am quite confused why this is still not supported. I already use the Kestrel webservice in my Xamarin app for a while. It seems that Microsoft.AspNetCore (v2.2.0) works fine in Xamarin and probably will work in MAUI too. Later versions don’t work anymore, because they are not available as separate packages. I never understood why an application that exposes a web-service should be treated so special (I don’t know of any other language that does this). ASP.NET core was just a bunch of packages with .NET core v2.2 and it worked fine.

I tested it with iOS, Android and UWP applications without any issues. I was hoping that MAUI and .NET 6 would really bring us one .NET.