Sands of MAUI: Issue #11

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 June 7, 2021:

Xamarin Community Standup

Maddy Leger and David Ortinau hosted the latest Xamarin Community Standup. On the agenda was recapping Build announcements and updates on .NET MAUI timelines. They were joined by Daniel Roth from the ASP.NET team to share the excitement about Blazor running on Mobile/Desktop on top of .NET MAUI.

Sure BlazorWebView is cool, but Blazor Hybrid apps are also native—it is priceless when Blazor code on Desktop interacts with other processes, like reading/writing local files with native text editors.

Aloha From Telerik UI for MAUI

With .NET MAUI hitting the Preview 4 milestone, the latest UI suite to join Progress Telerik is here—Telerik UI for MAUI, now available in Early Preview. The Telerik suite aims to provide polished, performant UI components tailored to .NET MAUI runtime that enable developers to deliver no-compromise user experiences across devices.

Telerik UI for MAUI comes with Windows/Mac installers to get the bits, along with a Demo App showcasing hot new components - Charts, Buttons, Border and ItemsControl.

Build 2021 Recap

The internet stops working when Jeff Fritz is not online. In true Fritz style, Jeff hosted an epic all-day Twitch stream to recap all the Build announcements relevant to .NET developers and pulled in lots of special guests to talk through demos, like Scott Hunter, David Ortinau and Daniel Roth.

Scott and David did not shy away from answering some difficult questions around the directions with .NET 6 and .NET MAUI—engineering efforts often need to target getting critical mass going for most developers, and then address tooling niceties and edge cases in subsequent releases.

What’s New With C# 9

Jason Bock, Developer Advocate at Rocket Mortgage, spoke recently at the May Meetup of the Columbus App Dev User Group. The conversation dove into all that’s new and exciting in C# 9, and Jason did walk-throughs of some key features with sample code.

This is particularly relevant for .NET developers as .NET 6 and .NET MAUI near production-readiness—we all want to write concise, readable, modern C# code. Moving forward, developers can expect .NET and C# releases to coincide every year—hallelujah.

.NET MAUI Merch

The unofficial but widely endorsed .NET MAUI shirt design has been quite popular, and Gerald Versluis set up a Bonfire store with some .NET MAUI/Xamarin Community Toolkit merchandise. You can grab some cool stuff and also donate—all proceeds go to charity. Looks like the community definitely leans toward dark-mode merch.

That’s it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!