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 May 24, 2021:
Some guy named Sam Basu joined Coding After Work to talk about all the different ways to build modern Windows/Mac Desktop apps. Sure the traditional stacks will keep on working fine, but web technologies are now welcome, thanks to Electron and modern WebViews like the new BlazorWebView. .NET MAUI and Blazor will enable more confidence to target Desktop solutions while sharing code with web.
David Ortinau had an honest answer when asked about .NET MAUI support in Visual Studio for Mac—sometime during mid 2021. Turns out, VS for Mac is undergoing UI updates from GTK to Cocoa and gaining support for .NET 6—so things are fluid. .NET CLI tools for MAUI would work fine on Mac, and VS Code users tinkering with MVU support with MAUI Handlers could use the Comet Extension.
Rachel Kang from the Xamarin/MAUI team joined James Montemagno for a Xamarin Show episode on building accessibility into mobile apps. Starting from the wonderful guide, Rachel talked about the concrete steps Xamarin developers could take towards making mobile apps more inclusive and what to look forward to in this regard with .NET MAUI.
Alvin Ashcraft joined a recent .NET Dev Show to talk about all things WinUI 3—the modern native UI/UX framework for building Windows apps. Alvin touched upon the history of Windows development stack and where things stand with WinUI at the moment with tooling/framework. Want to learn more about WinUI 3? Alvin’s brand new WinUI book might help.
The Surface Duo is enjoying some attention, and more dual-screen devices may be around the corner. Xamarin.Forms today and .NET MAUI tomorrow can be used to build apps that target dual-screen devices, but the added real estate demands fresh UX. Inspired by the Surface Duo US design guidelines, Craig Dunn wrote up a post on customizing animated layouts in Xamarin.Forms to cater to the Surface Duo. There should be more to learn about dual-screen app design and development experiences at Build.
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.