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.
.NET developers are excited with the reality of .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI)—the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform developer technology stack. With stable tooling and a rich ecosystem, .NET MAUI empowers developers to build native cross-platform apps for mobile/desktop from single shared codebase, while inviting web technologies in the mix.
While it may take a long flight to reach the sands of MAUI island, developer excitement around .NET MAUI is quite palpable with all the created content. Like the grains of sand, every piece of news/article/documentation/video/tutorial/livestream contributes toward developer experiences in .NET MAUI 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 May 5, 2025:
The .NET MAUI team hosts monthly Community Standup livestreams to celebrate all things .NET MAUI and provide updates—a wonderful way to bring the developer community together. A lot of good things are happening in .NET MAUI as a platform, and developer community excitement is noticeable. David Ortinau, Rachel Kang and Shane Neuville recently hosted the May .NET MAUI Community Standup—a .NET MAUI contributor’s story.
After some usual banter and recollection of old music bands, Rachel covered all the community news—.NET MAUI content contributions from the developer community are always impressive. It was then time to bring on the special guest of the month Alberto Aldegheri—one of the top community contributors to .NET MAUI.
Alberto talked through his contributions to .NET MAUI source code, obsession with performance improvements and open source library Nalu.Maui—it is nice to see engineering under the hood for popular frameworks. Despite all the improvements, .NET MAUI with .NET 9 could benefit from a lot of performance tuning for Android and iOS—a walk-through of the fixes was enlightening. Alberto also talked through Shell navigation, startup optimization and Layouts in his library—a wonderful hour geeking out over foundational engineering in .NET MAUI. Cheers.
.NET MAUI is built to enable .NET developers to create cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, with deep platform integrations, native UI and hybrid web experiences. Onscreen interactivity in apps plays a crucial role for many industries, but also helps in education, fun and creativity. There is something quite enticing about drawing on a screen with touch/pen/mouse, and Leomaris Reyes wrote up a wonderful article—checking out the DrawingView in .NET MAUI.
DrawingView provides a surface for drawing lines using either touch or mouse interaction and is part of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit. Leomaris starts with the basics of installing the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit in a fresh .NET MAUI app, configuring things and rendering the DrawingView. By default, DrawingView allows drawing a single line, meaning each new stroke replaces the previous one—but developers can easily turn on support for multiple lines and not clearing on finish.
A customizable drawing surface area to write or draw is just the start—it is also easy for developers to save off the drawings and provide additional interactivity for users. Let creativity flourish.
Developers should never be in doubt about what’s happening in the network layer. No matter what type of app, developers need visibility any time network calls are made from/into apps. This is particularly true for cross-platform mobile/desktop apps being made with .NET MAUI. One of the most popular network utilities for developers is Progress Telerik Fiddler Everywhere. Native mobile/desktop apps need top-notch network debugging, and nothing beats the flexibility of a true network proxy. Peter Vogel wrote up an article about the beloved network tool—5 features of Fiddler Everywhere that you may not know about.
While the original Fiddler Classic continues on Windows, the newer Fiddler Everywhere brings all of Fiddler’s functionality with consistent UI across Windows, macOS and Linux. With powerful traffic capturing, API composer, team collaboration, robust rules builder, advanced filtering and many more features, Fiddler faithfully serves the network needs of developer, Q/A folks, support engineers and end users alike.
Peter talks through how Fiddler helps testing everything around a backend Web Service. Key focus areas include authentication, stress testing, summarizing message responses and comparing snapshots. Through unique UI features and wide network flexibility, it is easy to see why Fiddler continues to be a trusted utility in developer toolchains toward building robust apps/services.
It is the age of AI, and there is a huge opportunity for .NET developers to infuse apps with solutions powered by generative AI and large/small language models. Modern AI is an opportunity to streamline and automate developer workflows for better productivity. GitHub Copilot is already one of the most popular and productive coding assistants for developers—an AI pair programmer that helps developers write better code. GitHub Copilot now offers flexibility as to how developers leverage AI coding assistance, and Ashley Willis wrote up a post—Copilot ask, edit and agent modes, and how to use them.
The article serves as an introduction to the three distinct modes of GitHub Copilot and a practical guide for integrating them effectively into developer workflows—the experiences are quite unique. Ask mode is the simplest chat conversations, focused entirely on answering programming question without touching any code. Edit mode is where GitHub Copilot can actually make review-ready code edits across chosen files—however, developers get to see the coding changes before acceptance. Agent mode lets developers give up the rein with a high-level prompt and then watch as Copilot autonomously plans the steps, selects the right files, runs tools or terminal commands, and iterates on code edits until the task is complete.
Agent mode is the newest, yet most powerful. It can reason across the entire project, take multi-step actions and hold onto a significant amount of context across a session. Context matters, and the key is good thoughtful initial instructions, and clear nudges along the way to make collaboration fun in Agentic workflows. For developers, it is all about which mode feels natural and empowering—GitHub Copilot is happy to help.
Modern mobile/desktop clients or web frontends are complicated, and developers can use all the help available to stay productive. Progress Software maintains a suite of UI components and libraries/tools to help developers be more successful—Telerik UI for all things .NET, and Kendo UI for all things JavaScript. There are fresh new bits cooking: say hello to the upcoming Telerik/Kendo UI 2025 Q2 release.
The upcoming release redefines developer productivity with AI. There will be market-first purpose-built AI code assistants for Telerik UI for Blazor and KendoReact. The goal is hallucination-free code generation for Blazor and React, minimizing needs for manual fixes to subpar AI results. Developers can expect deeply contextual prompt responses trained on source code/documentation/APIs. ThemeBuilder earns prompt-based styling thanks to AI theme generation and Telerik Reporting gains GenAI-powered Reporting insights.
With expanded adaptability across the web frameworks and lots of performance tuning, the upcoming Telerik/Kendo UI release gives developers all they need to build smarter, ship faster and create modern, responsive apps with unprecedented efficiency. Please stay tuned for release announcements and webinars. Developers should have much to celebrate with a big release with hot new bits for developer productivity and AI chops across .NET/JS ecosystems—upwards and onwards.
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 Developer Advocacy Manager for Developer Tooling products. With a long developer background, he now spends much of his time advocating modern web/mobile/cloud development platforms on Microsoft/Telerik/Kendo UI technology stacks. His spare times call for travel, fast cars, cricket and culinary adventures with the family.