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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 excited with .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI)—the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform developer experience. Going forward, developers will be empowered with .NET MAUI technology stack and tooling to build native cross-platform apps for mobile/desktop from single shared codebase.

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 towards developer knowledge 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 June 5, 2023:

.NET MAUI Community Standup

.NET MAUI has democratized .NET cross-platform development—a single shared codebase powers modern apps on mobile or desktop platforms. The .NET MAUI evolution has been continuous with framework/tooling updates and Microsoft Build conference was the perfect setup to look at the state of .NET MAUI as a product and an ecosystem.

David Ortinau, Beth Massi and Becky Buckler hosted the monthly June .NET MAUI Community Standup and the discussion topic was obvious—.NET MAUI recap from Build.

While the inmates were running the asylum without Maddy, the standup began with the usual coverage of news from the .NET MAUI ecosystem. Developers pushing the envelope beyond what's possible with default framework/tooling is a good indicator of excitement and adoption of .NET MAUI as the cross-platform development technology stack of choice.

The trio talked through some of the big .NET announcements from Microsoft Build and recapped session content relevant for .NET MAUI developers—AI is starting to have a bigger impact for developer productivity. The state of .NET and .NET MAUI is going strong, and the story only gets better from here on. Cheers.

Polished UI with .NET MAUI

The world runs on YouTube. With never-ending content on any topic of choice, including plenty on .NET MAUI, most of us are in consumption mode when on YouTube. There are a handful who dare to be content creators, and for them, YouTube numbers matter. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a cross-platform app that made sense of YouTube statistics? Daniel Hindrikes has recently started the journey of building YouStats from scratch and produced the third video—building an app with .NET MAUI and Telerik UI components.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And it's more powerful and wonderful UX when users have the ability to tinker with pictures. Daniel needed thumbnail image editing in his app—the ImageEditor UI component in Telerik UI for .NET MAUI can help.

Combined with a customizable Toolbar UI control for shortcuts, the Telerik ImageEditor shines in providing a plethora of built-in image editing features with well-thought out UX. The Toolbar is particularly useful for shortcuts/navigation in desktop apps that get busy—developers are at liberty to add a variety of UI controls inside the parent placeholder component and binding context helps in dynamic functionality.

Image editing with custom functionality is rich UX, and Daniel showcases the versatility of .NET MAUI with crisp Telerik UI across platforms. Cheers for the rest of the series!

Speech Recognition with .NET MAUI

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is a collection of reusable elements for app development with .NET MAUI, including animations, behaviors, converters, effects and helpers. The Toolkit aims to simplify common developer tasks when building iOS, Android, macOS and WinUI apps using .NET MAUI—the built-in extensions and UI components elevate the developer experience by providing more functionality out of the box. One of the cool new features in .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is Speech To Text and Vladislav Antonyuk wrote an article about it—speech recognition in .NET MAUI with CommunityToolkit.

As the name suggests, speech recognition in the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit allows for converting spoken words into text, which can be used inside the app in variety of ways. Classic use cases of speech-to-text include creating voice-activated assistants, transcribing audio recordings or building accessibility features. Vladislav showcases SpeechToText functionality in .NET MAUI Community Toolkit with easy to follow code samples—API features are plentiful and exception handling is robust.

While SpeechToText in .NET MAUI Community Toolkit requires user permissions and lack of connectivity or quality of hardware may affect accuracy, the mere availability of SpeechToText should open doors for interested developers. The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit now enables creation of a variety of more accurate, more responsive and more engaging speech-enabled apps—cheers to that.

Xamarin to .NET MAUI

While .NET MAUI is the evolution of .NET cross-platform development, the reality for many apps, enterprises and developers today is Xamarin. Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms developers today enjoy a rich ecosystem of framework/tooling—however, there is clearly an end game in sight, with Xamarin support officially ending in 2024. Migration from Xamarin to .NET MAUI is top of mind for many and Maddy Montaquilla did an on-demand session at Microsoft Build—upgrading from Xamarin to .NET MAUI.

Maddy started out making a case for what's to gain with the migration from Xamarin to .NET MAUI—a well architected platform, desktop support, single project, efficient tooling and performance upgrades are some of the big benefits. Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android are now essentially baked into .NET, while much of Xamarin.Forms codebase can be brought over to .NET MAUI land. An app's dependencies may be a blocker to migration—it makes sense to take stock of Xamarin apps now and start re-architecting things if needed.

There is, of course, tooling help to migrate from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI—Upgrade Assistant works as both Command Line and within Visual Studio. The Upgrade Assistant is happy to do much of the heavy lifting, keeping developers informed every step of the way when migrating projects from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI. Bottom line is, developers with Xamarin projects should not panic, but make concrete plans to upgrade from Xamarin to .NET MAUI—tooling is here to help.

Telerik Release

While .NET MAUI provides a modern .NET cross-platform development stack, Telerik UI for .NET MAUI gives developers wings—a comprehensive suite of complex performant UI components that work seamlessly across mobile/desktop form factors. The second release of the year is coming up for the Telerik, Kendo UI and Fiddler family of products—there is plenty of goodness to unpack for web, desktop and mobile developers.

Telerik UI enables developer teams to create modern digital experiences with tools for improved performance, increased adaptability, efficient UI styling and customization with high-value components. There is much to look forward to for web and desktop developers—the next Telerik release features tons of updates across Blazor, ASP.NET Core/MVC, WinForms, WPF, WinUI and Document Processing Libraries.

For developers going cross-platform, the new goodies in Telerik UI for .NET MAUI are plentiful—there are a bunch of new UI components like Conversational UI, Calendar, PDFViewer, RichTextEditor, TreeView and SlideView, along with updates to DataGrid and DataForm UI.

The upcoming Telerik release drops on June 7th, with release webinars/livestreams in days after—come hang to see how .NET developers get to be more productive.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!


SamBasu
About the Author

Sam Basu

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.

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