Brand-New MAUI .NET 7 Project Fails to Display the Welcome Page in VS 17.4.3

Question

I understand .NET 7 is new, but I think a workflow that should work out-of-the-box is to create a new MAUI template project (".NET MAUI App"), choose a name for that, and successfully build the just-created project. On my system, this consistently fails with this warning:

Severity    Code    Description Project File    Line    Suppression State
Warning XA1004  File 'obj\Debug\net7.0-android\lp\101\jl\res\..\res.zip' already exists.    Ch0501  C:\Program Files\dotnet\packs\Microsoft.Android.Sdk.Windows\33.0.4\tools\Xamarin.Android.EmbeddedResource.targets   36  

While I do not like this warning on a brand-new project, there is another issue: I nothing happens when I launch the project by clicking Windows Machine:

For .NET 6, this would launch a "welcome" form, welcoming you to MAUI. Now, the program runs but then ends without presenting any UI.

How are users expected to get started with MAUI with issues like this? I will single-step and debug to try to see what's going on, but shouldn't this just work??

Does anyone familiar with .NET 7 MAUI know why I am encountering these issues? What do I need to do to run the app so that it displays the MainPage "welcome" form on Windows?

Answer 1

I decided that I don't have time for MAUI's broken-ness. I visited several devoted MAUI forums, and many users have complained about functionality that's broken out-of-the-box using the latest of all available IDEs, frameworks, and tooling. MAUI's bug list is ever-growing and outpaces the rate at which bugs are fixed (often needing further fixes due to lack of QA testing). The fact that my basic question about MAUI received a few dozen reads (as of this writing) and no useful reply suggests that broad understand of MAUI fundamentals does not yet exist in the developer community. I don't have time or interest in being an extension of MAUI's QA team and to work with tools whose "hello world" out-of-the-box sample cannot run on a new installation. It's just ridiculous.

I installed Uno 4 instead, and their "hello world" app ran without a hitch (using .NET 7) on Windows and on my tethered Android device. So I plan to use Uno for my multi-platform C#/.NET 7 project. Maybe in the distant future, MAUI will be ready to be reconsidered--for now, it's a pet project that desperately needs some professional attention.