Sands of MAUI: Issue #107

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 12, 2023:

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 big release of the year just dropped for the Telerik, Kendo UI and Fiddler family of products—and as Yoan Krumov wrote up, there is plenty of goodness for web, desktop and mobile developers, along with .NET 8 Preview 4 support.

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 latest Telerik release features tons of updates across Blazor, ASP.NET Core/MVC, WinForms, WPF, WinUI and Document Processing Libraries.

Blazor Hybrid support is formal now—all of Telerik Blazor UI components can now be used inside native mobile/desktop apps with .NET MAUI, WinForms or WPF. 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 the ubiquitous DataGrid UI. The latest Telerik release dropped on June 7, with release webinars/livestreams to catch up on—the goal is make .NET developers more productive.

WPF to .NET MAUI

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has long been the cornerstone of Windows desktop development—with a solid framework and rich tooling ecosystem, WPF has enabled .NET developers to deliver complex but delightful desktop experiences. However, the C#/XAML codebase of a WPF app may be aging—developers have some choices to be modernize a WPF app to reach platforms outside of just Windows.

While not a trivial endeavor, .NET MAUI presents a way forward to reuse much of a WPF codebase and Rossitza Fakalieva wrote up a wonderful article—transform a WPF App to cross-platform with .NET MAUI.

Rossi starts out with the two major options for modernizing WPF apps—while Blazor Hybrid can bring in Blazor web UI inside desktop apps, for C#/XAML .NET developers, .NET MAUI would be the more enticing option. The next steps are to understand the differences in the UI stacks between WPF and .NET MAUI—there are visual tree XAML differences in control naming, as well as borders, height and width of UI components. The Layout and Window systems are different, as well as how events are wired up.

.NET MAUI really shines with cross-platform benefits from a single shared codebase—it's easy to share images and other resources, as well as customize UI components on a per platform basis with accessibility in mind. Migration from WPF to .NET MAUI isn't for the faint hearted, but Rossi astutely points out the subtle differences, so developers can reuse as much as code as possible while tweaking where needed to reap the benefits of a modern .NET cross-platform codebase.

Documents 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 fourth video—building an app with .NET MAUI and Telerik UI components.

.NET MAUI apps can have all the fancy UI, but the rubber hits the road when dealing with a big volume of data—there is a need to work with documents. Enterprise workflows often demand working with PDF, Word or Excel files—Telerik Document Processing Libraries can help for web, desktop or cross-platform apps. As a set of stand-alone .NET libraries, Telerik Document Processing brings full fidelity creation and manipulation of documents, and it is integrated inside most Telerik UI component suites.

Daniel has a ton of YouStats data that has been pulled down from YouTube APIs and displayed in a DataGrid inside his .NET MAUI app—wouldn't it be nice to export all the data to Excel/PDF files sorted by number of views? Daniel goes about integrating Telerik Document Processing Libraries inside his app and showcased the fine grained control developers have over how the documents created/exported. Document processing is tricky business for apps—Daniel shows off the versatility of .NET MAUI with crisp Telerik UI and cross-platform document processing libraries to keep developers productive.

C# Dev Kit

Visual Studio Code continues to be an uber popular code editor, empowering seamless developer experiences across Linux, macOS and Windows. There is big news for developers building .NET/C# apps on VS Code and Tim Heuer wrote up the announcement—say hello to C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code.

C# Dev Kit borrows some familiar concepts from Visual Studio to bring a more productive and reliable C# experience to VS Code. The C# Dev Kit consists of a set of VS Code Extensions that work together to provide a rich C# editing experience, AI-powered development, solution management and integrated testing. The core of C# Extension is now powered by a new fully open-source Language Server Protocol (LSP) host, creating a performant and flexible tooling environment that easily integrates new experiences into C# for VS Code.

C# Dev Kit adds on a bunch of features that .NET/C# developers care about a lot—a Visual Studio like Solution Explorer, expanded Test Explorer capabilities, AI-powered IntelliCode Extension and improved performance/reliability. The C# Dev Kit for VS Code is a substantial effort and a very welcome update for C# developers on VS Code—it also opens a world of future possibilities for .NET developers.

MAUI UI July

.NET MAUI is the promising way forward for .NET cross-platform development and developer excitement has been palpable—.NET MAUI now enjoys a vibrant community of developers willing to tinker and move the envelope forward. Developer communities always enjoy a challenge and Matt Goldman is bringing it on—.NET MAUI UI July is back.

Based on an idea originally started for Xamarin by Steven Thewissen, MAUI UI July is a month-long community-driven event, where anyone gets to share some of their enthusiasm and passion for .NET MAUI.

Matt had done MAUI UI July last year with great success—the community came together to produce an incredible range of content around .NET MAUI. The goal is to repeat the goodness this year and anything is welcome—replicating UI of some well known apps, innovative UI solutions, delightful UX or anything else fun with .NET MAUI.

Anybody can raise their had to participate—let's have fun and share our enthusiasm for .NET MAUI UI. And kudos to Matt for the .NET MAUI UI July initiative that brings the developer community together—should be an awesome month of content.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!