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 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 May 3, 2021:
Matt Lacey wrote up an article on InfoQ on how developers can choose their next cross-platform UI framework—a detailed comparison between Uno Platform and Xamarin.Forms aka soon to be .NET MAUI. While the two are similar XAML technologies with with identical tooling, Xamarin.Forms is more focused on Mobile, backed by Microsoft and has a much larger ecosystem.
Matt does point out that Uno Platform has WebAssembly support to reach the web, but makes a great point about Microsoft’s strategy around Blazor. With Blazor Mobile Bindings powering Blazor Hybrid apps for mobile/desktop through .NET MAUI, Microsoft would like developers to start looking at Blazor if they want apps that runs natively on devices and the web.
James Montemagno posted yet another helpful video for Xamarin.Forms or .NET MAUI developers. Creating adaptive app icons of various sizes for iOS and Android is always tedious—James walks us through how easy this can be with EasyAppIcon.
Luis Matos is excited about .NET MAUI and posted a detailed video on first impressions with MAUI. Luis talks the current developer experience with .NET MAUI—covering installation, architecture, tooling and more.
Speaking of first impressions with .NET MAUI, developer Rakeshkumar Desai tried out MAUI for the first time and documented the getting-started experience. Rakeshkumar notes the preview CLI tooling, but is impressed by fast build times in .NET MAUI.
As if craving for .NET MAUI shirts wasn’t enough, Gerald Versluis teased us with some shiny MAUI stickers for laptops and anything else where you want to show off. Sounds like these designs are courtesy of William S Rodriguez and Edwin van Wijk—raw bits available from .NET Foundation swag repo.
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.