Restore AR Toolkit to v200

[nCastle1]

At this time, AR Toolkit will not be included with the initial 200.0 release of ArcGIS Maps SDK for .NET due to an issue with the underlying support for ARCore in .NET. We are closely monitoring this issue and once the ARCore dependency is resolved, we will continue with testing and with the intent to release support for both iOS and Android in unison.

In the meantime, if you are interested only in support for iOS you can clone this repo and build the AR Toolkit locally. Custom builds of AR Toolkit have been tested and work with both .NET 6 iOS and .NET MAUI (iOS only).

[SokoFromNZ]

When can we expect the Toolkit to work with MAUI? I would only need Android support at the moment...

[dotMorten]

@SokoFromNZ The ball is in Microsoft's court, since their ARCore bindings are broken for .NET 6+. Until they fix that, we can't really bring it back. The main branch does have a working iOS implementation (but I get that doesn't help you).

[SokoFromNZ]

Yeah... MAUI is really horrible. I've opened Issues there as well and none of them are taken care of at the moment.
I still cannot understand how they dared to release such a buggy framework.
Anyhow...thanks for the feedback.
I kinda missed the the link to the issue in OP is to the MAUI project.

[dotMorten]

🤷‍♂️ I've generally been very happy with the quality of .NET MAUI.

[SokoFromNZ]

Hmmm... interesting. You are the first one I know of.
I'm mainly developing with .NET and WPF since 15 years now and compared to this, MAUI feels like a beta version of a framework.
We dared to start a new big project with MAUI in May which should be released in January. We had to cut back from releasing it for Win, iOS & Android to just Android, and it's still a hassle. 70% of my time I devote to find workarounds to MAUI bugs.

[mbranscomb]

@SokoFromNZ I'd love to hear more about how you use our AR Toolkit today and/or any future plans for implementing AR.

Thanks

[SokoFromNZ]

@mbranscomb I wanted to use the BasemapGallery in our MAUI app. But ended up implementing a basemap chooser by myself as this does not work.
To be frank: I use the BasemapGallery in a WPF app but today I'm removing it there as well. Reasons:

• No localization support (Need the descriptions & tooltips in different languages)
• I could not figure out how to save & restore the last selection of the user after restart of the app

[grimmi]

The main branch does have a working iOS implementation

Hi @dotMorten - is this still correct? Right now I'm trying to use ARSceneView in a MAUI (iOS) app and am facing quite some problems. E.g. when calling into RenderFrame from ARSceneView.iOS it's not happening on the UI thread and also I always get the camera feed even if I don't enable (or explicitly disable it). (I see the exact same problems when running the sample app on an iPad)

We recently updated from XF to MAUI (and to v200.0 of the runtime) and are now deliberating whether to move back (and lose quite a lot of effort) or somehow make this work. Having a working iOS implementation would help us quite a bit, even if we would have to build the toolkit ourselves.

[edit]: Ah, I just found the branch where iOS AR is supposed to be fixed. Will have a look at that next week. Keeping hope up that we won't have to go back to XF :)

[dotMorten]

@grimmi We haven't worked on the AR bits in a while so things might have changed from out under us, since the project is currently on hold due to the Android bits has been deprecated by both Google and Microsoft. When we did work on it iOS was working. There is a work-in-progress branch that might fix some of your issues here: #466