Sands of MAUI: Issue #60

Welcome to the Sands of MAUI—newsletter-style issues dedicated to bringing together latest .NET MAUI content relevant to developers.

A particle of sand—tiny and innocuous. But put a lot of sand particles together and we have something big—a force to reckon with. It is the smallest grains of sand that often add up to form massive beaches, dunes and deserts.

Most .NET developers are looking forward to .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)—the evolution of Xamarin.Forms with .NET 6. Going forward, developers should have much more confidence in the technology stack and tools as .NET MAUI empowers native cross-platform solutions on mobile and desktop.

While it is a long flight until we reach the sands of MAUI, developer excitement is palpable in all the news/content as we tinker and prepare for .NET MAUI. Like the grains of sand, every piece of news/article/video/tutorial/stream contributes towards developer knowledge and we grow a community/ecosystem willing to learn and help.

Sands of MAUI is a humble attempt to collect all the .NET MAUI awesomeness in one place. Here's what is noteworthy for the week of June 6, 2022:

.NET MAUI Launch Party

Maddy Montaquila and David Ortinau hosted the latest episode of the .NET MAUI Community Standup—the monthly standup show with a very different vibe this time round. After 14 Previews and 3 Release Candidate builds, .NET MAUI has reached the coveted General Availability (GA) milestone. This is a big deal and warranted a launch celebration during the .NET MAUI Community Standup.

It is always good to see the folks in a team that put a product together—it's been a long road for .NET MAUI. A whole host of folks from the .NET MAUI team joined the stream—familiar faces like Jonathan Peppers, Tim Miller, Rui Marinho, Javier Suarez, Rachel Kang, Gerald Versluis, Sweekriti Satpathy, Jonathan Dick and more.

The team answered a plethora of questions—latest in .NET MAUI bits, updates to Visual Studio tooling, MAUI Graphics, desktop strategies and getting started with .NET MAUI. More than anything else, huge kudos due to the .NET MAUI team—it's been a long journey to GA and things are just getting started.

.NET MAUI UI with C#

Arguably most .NET MAUI projects will lean towards being a C#/XAML code base—Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) has long proven to be rich way to define an app's visual interface and user interactions. However, let's face it—the full power of XAML and associated tooling does have a learning curve. Would C# proficiency not be enough to work with .NET MAUI? Thankfully, it is and C# is a solid option for building .NET MAUI visual interface.

James Montemagno hosted a recent On .NET show and had Brandon Minnick and Shaun Lawrence as guests—the topic of discussion was creating .NET MAUI UIs in C# Markup.

Thanks to the open source .NET MAUI Community Toolkit, C# Markup Extensions make it easy for developers to start defining their app UI/interactions in pure C#. With a fluent API and wonderful Visual Studio Intellisense, C# can quickly become a productive way to declare the visual markup of app UI.

Brandon and Shaun further drive home the point with C# advantages over XAML—with refactoring, data binding, converters and most importantly, faster load times with C# UI. Pitched side by side, C# makes a strong case to not add XAML to the learning curve in .NET MAUI. At the end of the day, it is up to developers how to define their .NET MAUI UI, and choice is never a bad thing.

Celebrating Telerik UI for .NET MAUI

Alyssa Nicoll hosts the weekly JS Girl in a .NET World Twitch streams—logging the wonderful journey as someone completely new to the .NET ecosystem, tries out the modern app development in .NET. The latest episode had yours truly as guest and one can guess the topic—the latest in .NET MAUI news after GA.

The goal was to celebrate Telerik UI for .NET MAUI also reaching GA milestone after a lots of engineering love while in preview.

We often talk about technology, but not enough about the people behind it—it was great to see some faces from the Telerik .NET MAUI teams. Alyssa and Sam also tinkered with latest .NET MAUI installations and played with Telerik Demo apps built with .NET MAUI that are now in the App Stores. Like most JS Girl in .NET World shows, the best part about the streams is with audience interactions—it's great to see folks genuinely excited about the latest in .NET.

Prism for .NET MAUI

The Model View ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern has always been well suited for large C#/XAML codebases and .NET MAUI is no exception. And if developers had to get help on the MVVM framework front, it's hard to beat the popularity of Prism—the workhorse and plumbing of many large enterprise projects. There is good news for developers who are fond of Prism from WPF/Xamarin.Forms worlds—Prism for .NET MAUI is now out as a public Beta.

Dan Siegel wrote up the Prism for .NET MAUI announcement—this is a big deal with a lot of effort poured in.

Prism for .NET MAUI rides the architectural changes in .NET MAUI compared to Xamarin.Forms—and aims to make developer lives easier with familiar paradigms. This is immediately discernible in application startup with .NET MAUI using the generic .NET App Builder pattern—meet the PrismAppBuilder, the extension method that helps developers configure most things about Prism.

Prism for .NET MAUI builds on some of things developers love the most about Prism—URI based Navigation, easy Service Registration with Dependency Injection (DI) Containers, Locator pattern and a brand new Navigation Builder. Thanks to Dan's detailed blog post, it is easy to get started with Prism for .NET MAUI—and it never hurts to support open source frameworks/maintainers.

.NET MAUI Learn Challenge

Now that .NET MAUI is out as a GA product, understandably a lot of developers are wanting to learn .NET MAUI. There is geeky satisfaction to learning a new technology and getting our feet wet getting proficient with basics. The Microsoft Learn team wants to sweeten the learning journey with a Let's Learn .NET MAUI Challenge—ongoing for the next few weeks.

The goal is simple—take the challenge and become a cross-platform mobile/desktop app building superstar. The Learn modules help developers understand the promise of .NET MAUI and get started building cross-platform mobile/desktop client apps with all the platform nuances.

The predetermined learning content allows participants to choose their content and makes it a competition—yes, there is a leaderboard that is updated frequently. What's holding you back?

That's it for now.

We'll see you next week with more awesome content relevant to .NET MAUI.

Cheers, developers!