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 towards 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 28, 2021:
Glenn von Breadmeister hosted a recent Ask the Expert show on The future of modern application development with .NET—guests were the usual suspects, Scott Hunter & David Ortinau. This was a great conversational show about the technology stack and developer experiences that .NET 6 enables. The trio had honest answers to many audience questions about .NET MAUI, Blazor, WASM and platform support.
Guess who lives on the bleeding edge and educates other developers to come along for the ride? Gerald Versluis. Like clockwork, as soon as .NET MAUI Preview 5 was out, Gerald posted an excellent walkthrough on what was in store for developers wanting to tinker—new documentation, animations/transformations, Shell & other UI components and single project improvements. Also helpful is how Gerald takes the time to detail down the sample Weather ’21 app—nothing like running hot bits and seeing a shiny app as showcase.
James Montemagno hosted a recent Xamarin Show episode and had Eilon Lipton as a guest. Eilon and team were the ones who started the revolution last year with Blazor Mobile Bindings—bringing Blazor component model and Razor syntax to build native or hybrid mobile/desktop apps. Fast forward to .NET MAUI Blazor, Blazor goodness is very welcome on .NET MAUI, WinForms and WPF—a great way to build fresh cross-platform apps or modernize desktop apps through code sharing with web.
Want to try the Model-View-Update design pattern for cross-platform apps with .NET MAUI? The Comet UI framework is your best ride. Thanks to James Clancey’s open source MVU implementation, Comet provides an easy way to describe the UI visual tree in C#, get automatic data binding and hot reload across various platforms, along with VS Code support. Comet is experimental, but the updated template is now a part of .NET MAUI CLI tooling—more flexibility for developers.
Just starting out with .NET MAUI? Melissa Houghton provides a wonderful overview of the Xamarin technology stack and how things are evolving to .NET MAUI.
That’s it for now.
We’ll see you next week with more awesome content relevant to .NET MAUI.
Cheers, developers!
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.