[IOS] Moving to .Net 6 caused static assets from the IOS project to be missing at runtime

[arg-drummond]

Current behavior

Here is the directory structure of the IOS head that worked before with Xamarin:

Assets/
    Default-568h@2x.png
    SplashScreen@2x.png
    SpashScreen@3x.png
    Fonts/
         uno-fluentui-assets.tff
LaunchScreen.storyboard

Here is the extract from the csproj-file

	<ItemGroup>
		<InterfaceDefinition Include="LaunchScreen.storyboard" />
	</ItemGroup>
	
	<ItemGroup>
		<Compile Include="Main.cs" />
		<BundleResource Include="Assets\Fonts\uno-fluentui-assets.ttf" />
		<BundleResource Include="Assets\SplashScreen%402x.png" />
		<BundleResource Include="Assets\SplashScreen%403x.png" />
		<BundleResource Include="Assets\Default-568h%402x.png" />
	</ItemGroup>

Behaviour:

• All icons are missing and replaced by question marks.
• The images that should appear on the splashscreen are missing, while the splashscreen itself appears.

Images imported from the shared directory using absolute paths work as well.

Expected behavior

The static imports work as previously.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible)

Use above structure and target .NET6-ios.

[jeromelaban]

Thanks for the report. The structure of .NET 6 projects is different, and the assets need to be in a specific folder. See this document about migrating projects and let us know if there's something else missing.

[arg-drummond]

I am using

Microsoft.Maui.Devices for display rotation,
Microsoft.Maui.ApplicationModel & Microsoft.Maui.ApplicationModel.Communication for the E-Mail API,
Microsoft.Maui.Storage for SecureStorage and CacheDirectory access.

I am not ruling out the issue being on MAUI's end as it should work on regular Xamarin.ios/-.android. source.

Without support for Maui.Essentials in face of eventual deprecation of Xamarin.Essentials, do we have to settle with implementing everything natively again?

[jeromelaban]

Most of these APIs are already implemented by Uno. See Orientation with SimpleOrientationSensor, Email with EmailManager, Secure Storage with PasswordVault, for example.

[arg-drummond]

@jeromelaban

Alright, it turns out the blog post is wrong or at least outdated on the usage of <UsingMauiEssentials>True</UsingMauiEssentials>. It sould have been <UseMauiEssentials>True</UseMauiEssentials> all along. Fixing this made <UseMaui>True</UseMaui> unnecessary and got the Uno splash screen to work again as expected. This also sounds a lot like there should no issues to be expected with Uno as long as only the Essentials are used.

While I can now build for debug and adhoc successfully, release builds fail with errors that would not occur with Xamarin before, such as

Failed to AOT compile SQLitePCLRaw.provider.sqlite3.dll, the AOT compiler exited with code 134

when using SQLitePCL

and

ILStrip failed for C:/Git/MySolution/MyProject.Localization/bin/Release/netstandard2.1/en-Gb/MyProject.Localization.resources.dll: 
File '/Users/adrummond/Library/Caches/Xamarin/mtbs/builds/MyProject.iOS/aa2e5c207cf0/C:/Git/MySolution/MyProject.Localization/bin/Release/netstandard2.1/en-Gb/MyProject.Localization.resources.dll' not found.

when using resource files with a compile directive.

Do you happen to have any clue for me on where the causes might be? While it could be separate issues with .NET 6, I might as well just miss something in my project configuration specifically for release builds that the Uno templates do not account for.

[jeromelaban]

Thanks for the update on MauiEssentials. For SQLite, it's likely that this dependency needs to be updated to .NET 6 to work properly, but in all cases, it's using a part of the tooling that Uno does not manage. It's probably best to report this in the .NET iOS repo, same goes for the other localization issue.

[arg-drummond]

@jeromelaban I managed to resolve these things, nothing of it seemed Uno-related, so I'm closing here.
Thanks again.

[queequac]

@jeromelaban I have also issues with assets on net6, but with Android.
I follow the approach for splashscreen as described here.
It always worked fine with Xamarin, with net6 it behaves different depending on my settings.
Using Uno 4.4 it worked as long as I did not turn on LLVM. With Uno 4.5 it's not working at all. Here it always get compilation error Resources\drawable\splash.xml(2): error APT2260: resource drawable/splashscreen (aka my.package:drawable/splashscreen) not found.

Is that documentation outdated? Or what could be wrong here?

[jeromelaban]

4.5 should not have changed much with regards to the way android resources work. .NET 6 varies only with the location of the files (it should be under the Android folder) but otherwise should be the same.

[queequac]

Mhm, strange. As I said, works with 4.4, but breaks with 4.5. Also strange why LLVM prevents the resources to be generated correctly.
Maybe I can create a small repo tomorrow, so someone else can have a look at this.

[queequac]

Interesting, my file in the shared project (./assets/splashscreen.scale-400.png) results in a splashscreen.png in the corresponding drawable folder... with Uno 4.5 it is called assets_splashscreen.png, that's why the build did not work before updating the splash.xml. Strange thing...

[jeromelaban]

About Android, this is a breaking change we've included to avoid naming clashes between content folders. See the 4.5 release notes for additional details (breaking changes section).

This probably means we need to adjust the docs if those rely on a specific name.