Welcome to the Sands of MAUI—newsletter-style issues dedicated to bringing together the 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 toward 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 July 19, 2021:
Big news—.NET MAUI Preview 6 is here. After half a dozen Preview releases, much of the .NET MAUI vision and tooling is starting to come together. The underlying SDKs powering .NET MAUI are nicely streamlined now into maui, maui-mobile and maui-desktop workloads, while the maui-check tool continues to evolve to run additional validations on local development environment. David Ortinau emphasized the key functionalities now lit up in .NET MAUI, including gesture recognizers, clipping with shapes, native alerts and single project enhancements—all ready to be tinkered with today.
Like clockwork, Gerald Versluis published a video right away detailing all of the .NET MAUI Preview 6 updates—from a developer’s perspective. Gerald covered what the developer experience would be with Preview 6 bits, with updated workloads and tooling—including the need for XCode 13 Beta 1 for targeting iOS/MacOS. Overall, a great way to catch up on all things new in .NET MAUI Preview 6 and looking ahead at what’s on the horizon for Preview 7.
Fond of the Xamarin Community Toolkit library as a Xamarin.Forms developer? It is evolving as well to the new .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—still open source and community supported. As it’s fully optimized for .NET MAUI, work is underway to port functionality/components from the Xamarin Community Toolkit into .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—targeted for Aug 2021 for first preview.
Developer Advocate Brandon Minnick detailed the NuGet packages that will make up the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit along with platform dependencies, as well as .NET MAUI–compatible versions of the Xamarin Community Toolkit to avoid breaking changes while porting apps.
The other good news is .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is joining forces with Windows Community Toolkit team to share code/documentation and combine Engineering/DevOps.
Need to get caught up with all things .NET MAUI in a single day? Tune in to the Surfing in MAUI long format Twitch stream on Wednesday, July 21, between 11 am-3 pm EDT—broadcast live to twitch.tv/codeitlive. Sam Basu (yours truly) will host a stellar lineup of speakers, covering everything from .NET MAUI basics, what's new, engineering details, migrations and development pipelines. Lots of learning and chatting with experts—should be a fun day.
James Montemagno and the ever-colorful Frank Krueger host the popular Merge Conflict weekly developer podcast. Merge Conflict recently hit the 5-year mark—time flies when you are having fun.
Through 266 episodes, James and Frank have shared developer news and honest conversations, and geeked out over myriads of tech topics, particularly relevant for .NET/Xamarin developers. Cheers, you two—onward and upward.
That’s it for now.
We’ll see you next week with more awesome content relevant to .NET MAUI.
Cheers, developers!
Sam Basu is a technologist, author, speaker, Microsoft MVP, gadget-lover and Progress Developer Advocate for Telerik products. With a long developer background, he now spends much of his time advocating modern web/mobile/cloud development platforms on Microsoft/Telerik technology stacks. His spare times call for travel, fast cars, cricket and culinary adventures with the family. You can find him on the internet.