Sands of MAUI: Issue #117

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 the .NET MAUI technology stack and stable 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 September 11, 2023:

.NET MAUI Community Standup

Developer excitement is palpable for .NET MAUI—the evolution of cross-platform .NET development stack reaching mobile/desktop from a shared codebase. The .NET MAUI team hosts a monthly Community Standup livestreams to celebrate all things .NET MAUI and provide updates—a wonderful way to bring the developer community together. Maddy Montaquila and David Ortinau hosted the latest standup with a special guest—the September .NET MAUI Community Standup was fun.

Maddy started the show covering the usual developer community contributions—a big talking point was the impending retirement of Visual Studio for Mac. David chimed in with what's coming up next to make the Visual Studio .NET MAUI Extension a first-class editor for building .NET MAUI apps—developers should find stable tooling that only gets better.

It was then time to turn to the special guests for the show—Allan Ritchie of Shiny fame. Shiny is a popular cross-platform framework designed to make working with device services and background processes easy, testable and consistent for developers. For .NET MAUI developers, Shiny brings along lot of goodies—device permissions, logging, background jobs, BLE support, beacons, push notifications and more.

Allan talked through all things shiny in Shiny V3.0 release—a lot of streamlined developer workflow enhancements ready out of the box.

.NET MAUI Community Toolkit Update

.NET MAUI is the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform development stack, allowing developers to reach mobile and desktop form factors from a single shared codebase. There is much to be excited about .NET MAUI—framework maturity, stable tooling and welcoming web developers. Some of the folks who care a lot about .NET MAUI came together for a community-driven Twitch long stream named Paddle Boarding in MAUI, and Gerald Versluis dropped by for an update on .NET MAUI Community Toolkit.

The goal of the Paddle Boarding in MAUI livestream was simple—to share knowledge, show off code/tooling, engage and learn together, while raising charitable donations for supporting Maui wildfire recovery.

Gerald started off introducing the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—a collection of reusable elements for application development with .NET MAUI, including animations, behaviors, converters, effects and helpers. The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is open sourced, available as a NuGet package and aimed at simplifying common .NET MAUI developer tasks.

The rest of the time was well spent in covering some of the popular utilities within .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—converters, media element, snackbars, toasts and more. Developers building for .NET MAUI are surely more productive when using the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—cheers to the team of contributors.

Uno Platform Release

Uno Platform is an open source framework for building single codebase native mobile, web, desktop and embedded apps—all from the comfort of chosen IDE and C#/XAML. Uno Platform just had a major release, with big implications for .NET MAUI ecosystem—say hello to Uno Platform 4.10.

The big news in latest Uno Platform release is .NET MAUI Embedding—with the 4.10 release, Uno Platform allows for rendering of .NET MAUI-specific controls from all UI component makers. For platforms targeted by .NET MAUI, this would mean a huge collection of .NET MAUI cross-platform UI controls can light up the UI, and that includes all of Telerik UI for .NET MAUI.

Enabled through the Uno.Extensions package, .NET MAUI embedding opens up the ecosystem for more flexibility as developers plot migrations from Xamarin.Forms—the Uno Platform team created plenty of sample apps showing all kinds of .NET MAUI components lighting up native UI. In addition, the latest Uno Platform release includes a lot of goodies, like Lightweight Styling, Shadows, Hot Restart for iOS, WebAssembly Content Security Policy (CSP) support and more—elevated developer productivity for the win.

Telerik Blazor UI

While .NET MAUI provides a wonderful foundation for modern .NET cross-platform development, serious developers know the need to augment the UI stack—no point trying to recreate the wheel when engineering is expensive. While Telerik UI for .NET MAUI suite augments .NET MAUI native apps with C#/XAML, Telerik UI for Blazor is squarely meant to elevate modern web apps—a comprehensive UI control suite of native performant Blazor components.

Thanks to modern cross-platform WebView components, Telerik Blazor web components/styles are very welcome on native mobile/desktop apps. Becky Buckler recently hosted an aging developer for an On .NET show episode—beautiful Blazor UI everywhere with Telerik.

The conversation started with the obvious benefits of Blazor—.NET developers get to write C# code front and back for modern web apps. Thanks to Blazor Hybrid, all of Telerik Blazor UI components now work seamlessly on .NET MAUI apps—that means complex web UI/styles reused for mobile and desktop apps. Telerik Blazor UI can also be embedded inside legacy windows desktop apps written with WPF or WinForms, thus providing islands of Blazor UI towards app modernization.

Blazor web components and styles can now be truly shared between web and native apps—all of Telerik UI works everywhere with full support. With thorough docs, real samples and solid support, Telerik UI for Blazor is here to augment modern .NET web development with beautiful performant UI components—all of that is also welcome on mobile and desktop apps for added developer productivity.

.NET Upgrade Assistant Update

Modern .NET can be enticing—what's not to like about web/cross-platform frameworks, performance tuning and tooling enhancements? The present reality for many apps, however, may be Xamarin or web/desktop apps running on older .NET runtimes—a modernization strategy is needed to push things forward. Thankfully, the .NET Upgrade Assistant is here is help with a new release and Olia Gavrysh wrote up the announcement—feature updates and .NET MAUI migration enhancements with .NET Upgrade Assistant.

The .NET Upgrade Assistant can be a handy tool to update several project features, like the modern SDK-style project files—developers can now decouple such updates from having to upgrade the .NET runtime. This should help developers have more granular control towards a more iterative approach to modernizing your applications.

There are new features folks migrating from Xamarin to .NET MAUI, starting with a more capable CLI version of the .NET Upgrade Assistant for macOS. Xamarin to .NET MAUI migration invariably involves some manual steps—.NET Upgrade Assistant now sports new automatic code fixers. With the new Upgrade Assistant C# analyzers, developers will be offered to fix up code to make things more compatible with .NET MAUI—tooling is trying to provide all the help to make the transition to .NET MAUI smoother.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!