Sands of MAUI: Issue #118

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 25, 2023:

.NET MAUI for .NET 8

The next milestone in the evolution of .NET is coming up soon—.NET 8 has been cooking and is scheduled to hit prime time in November 2023. The latest .NET 8 bits are out—.NET 8 has reached Release Candidate 1 status. Along with the latest .NET 8 release come hot new bits for .NET MAUI and David Ortinau wrote up the release announcement—.NET MAUI for .NET 8 Release Candidate 1 is now out.

The latest .NET MAUI release for .NET 8 now carries a go live license—developers should have the confidence to use the release bits for production applications. The dominant theme of .NET MAUI work in .NET 8 is code quality—increased stability can be seen everywhere from framework to platform implementations, all with better tooling. There are plenty of enhancements with memory leak resolutions, UI control functionality, platform-specific fixes and performance optimizations—all contributing to smoother app performance and responsiveness.

This release also introduces the first steps towards Xcode 15 Beta support—upcoming releases will see introduction of new APIs in Apple SDKs for iOS 17. It's upwards and onwards for .NET MAUI until the .NET 8 milestone—cheers to modern .NET cross-platform development.

Telerik UI

With .NET MAUI, developers can target mobile and desktop form factors from a single shared codebase. The reality of serious .NET MAUI app development, however, means catering to different platform experiences and building complex yet performant UI that renders consistently across devices. It would be nice if developers could get more productive building .NET MAUI app functionality, without having to rediscover the wheel for UI complexity.

Gerald Versluis is ready for Christmas in a fancy sweater and produced a video—developer productivity with Telerik UI for .NET MAUI.

Gerald starts out making a case for where professionally engineered UI components shine—consistent rendering, fine-tuned performance and dependability with documentation/support. There are various ways .NET MAUI developers can bring in Telerik UI goodness within their apps—the NuGet source route seems to be the easiest. The Telerik suite comes with VS Templates and a Control Toolbox—everything is accessible for developer productivity.

Gerald dabbles into a variety of impressive UI components—TabView, Calendar, Accordion, Image Editor and PDF Viewer. With easy-to-run demos on across platforms, Gerald showcases where Telerik UI for .NET MAUI shines—consistent performant UI for developer productivity and elevated user experiences.

Gaming with .NET MAUI

.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 called Paddle Boarding in MAUI, and Shaun Lawrence dropped by for a super interesting session—gaming with .NET MAUI.

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. Mere mortals build apps with .NET MAUI, while talented developers try to build games with .NET MAUI—the god developers amongst us go a level higher. Shaun Lawrence is casually building a whole game engine called Orbit with .NET MAUI and shared recent progress with all the technical details.

With granular UI control with Microsoft.Maui.Graphics, Shaun showcased what developers need to understand when trying to build real world games—game loops, UI threads, Lottie graphics, integration with variety of game controllers, managing game board with coordinates and so much more. Best wishes to Shaun for upcoming work on the game engine and cheers for the inspirations.

Charts with .NET MAUI

Data is everywhere. Data is plentiful. It is easy to get overwhelmed with the quantity of data in modern digital lives—the only saving grace is visualization. Data visualization is the only way to make sense of data and be able to see trends—it is how users of modern apps expect to consume data.

Invariably, many developers building .NET MAUI apps will have to deal with plentiful data and data visualization is the way to present the information, while keeping users engaged. Telerik Chart UI components can help and Rossitza Fakalieva wrote up an article—visualizing data in 15 ways with modern .NET MAUI Charts.

Telerik UI for .NET MAUI is a rich UI component library for polished performant UI components that work seamlessly across mobile and desktop—data visualization is a big part of it. Developers have known Telerik UI for beautiful charts/graphs and the .NET MAUI suite does not disappoint.

Rossi starts off with how developers can get started with Telerik Charts—there is a huge variety of charts catering to rich user experiences for .NET MAUI apps. Given the type and volume of data, developers can choose the right match for Chart UX—Cartesian Charts can be Bar/Line/Spline/Area/Scatter/Stacked while Financial Charts can be Pie/Donut/OHLC/Candlestick, and more. Every Telerik Chart has feature-rich APIs for Annotations, Legends, TrackBall, Pan/Zoom and endless customizations.

With thorough docs, real samples and solid support, modern Charts in Telerik UI for .NET MAUI are here to help .NET MAUI developers be more productive—developers can light up gorgeous data visualization experiences.

Grid with .NET MAUI

While .NET MAUI provides a solid foundational framework and stable tooling, real-world app development often demands a lot from developers—some UI empowerment is welcome. Most modern apps need showing a list of things—tabular data needs proper UI visualization and users need lots of features to work with the data.

A data grid is often the UI component of choice, yet a grid can make or break an app. The Telerik .NET MAUI DataGrid can try to help and an aging developer wrote up an article—elevate .NET MAUI Apps with powerful Grid.

Progress Telerik UI for .NET MAUI is a comprehensive UI component library, aimed at making .NET MAUI developers more productive—a set of polished performant UI components for cross-platform mobile and desktop apps. Arguably the most popular UI component in Telerik UI for .NET MAUI is the ubiquitous DataGrid—a thoroughly engineered rich data grid that is ready to light up apps with full functionality.

With Telerik UI for .NET MAUI, developers for the first time have a Telerik DataGrid UI that works seamlessly across mobile and desktop form factors—the same UI component caters to different user experiences based on target platforms, touch-first on iOS/Android and mouse-keyboard first on Windows/macOS.

The Telerik DataGrid is feature rich with developer flexibility in mind—there are lots of APIs for managing columns, rows, grouping, filtering, sorting, aggregates, editing, virtualization, styling and more. Developer don’t need to spends years of engineering building all the feaures expected from a modern Grid—the Telerik UI for .NET MAUI DataGrid has it all built in.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!