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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.

.NET developers are excited with the reality of .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI)—the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform developer technology stack. With stable tooling and a rich ecosystem, .NET MAUI empowers developers to build native cross-platform apps for mobile/desktop from single shared codebase, while inviting web technologies in the mix.

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 toward developer experiences in .NET MAUI and we grow a community/ecosystem willing to learn & 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 October 21, 2024:

.NET MAUI with RC2

The next big release of .NET is already in the works—.NET 9 is scheduled for arrival in November 2024. As the latest .NET release gets final touches around performance, stability and additional optimizations, the next milestone has been reached with .NET 9 Release Candidate (RC) 2 and there are some nice things for .NET MAUI developers. James Montemagno and David Ortinau covered all things .NET MAUI in .NET 9 RC2—say hello to the .NET MAUI Podcast Episode #125.

As with RC1, this RC2 release is covered by a go-live license, so developers can receive support when using .NET 9 in production apps. Along with .NET 9 RC2 come fresh new bits for .NET MAUI—this release is focused primarily on quality improvements.

The big news for .NET MAUI in .NET 9 RC2 is full compatibility with Xcode 16, which includes SDK support for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, tvOS 18 and macOS Sequoia 15. No more pinning .NET/.NET MAUI SDKs for backward compatibility—developers can upgrade to .NET 9 RC2 without hesitation and all iOS simulators work with .NET MAUI bits. XCode 16 support for .NET MAUI extends to both .NET 8 and .NET 9 runtimes. James and David discuss the latest .NET MAUI updates in depth during the podcast episode. Developers can get started with .NET 9 RC2 and latest .NET MAUI bits today—.NET 9 promises great things for the ecosystem.

The .NET MAUI Podcast: Hello Xcode 16 and .NET 9 RC2

Biometrics 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. Many apps often deal with very sensitive information that demand high security. For this, mobile devices can take advantage of biometric sensors. However, .NET developers should not have to reinvent the wheel for cross-platform mobile apps, and Leomaris Reyes wrote up an excellent post—using biometric identification in .NET MAUI.

Several industries require high levels of information security in apps. For mobile devices, this is commonly achieved using facial or fingerprint identification. For .NET MAUI developers, tapping into biometric user identification is easy, thanks to the Plugin.Maui.Biometric plugin, and Leomaris starts from the basics to incorporate such security measures. It’s crucial to understand that developers need to check whether fingerprint or facial recognition matches the registered user—this biometric information cannot be manipulated, and is only to used to grant/deny access to sensitive information.

Leomaris walks through how developers can set up biometric permission settings in Android/iOS apps, as well as faking identification with PIN for device simulators. With Plugin.Maui.Biometric, configuration is easy and developers can tap into user biometric identification in no time—for .NET MAUI apps needing high security, developers have the needed tooling.

MAUI app using Plugin.Maui.Biometric

.NET Conf

Modern .NET is powerful, open-source, cross-platform and welcoming to all with mature tooling accompanied by rich ecosystems. The next big milestone with .NET is already in the works—.NET 9 is scheduled for arrival in November 2024. Aligned with the release of .NET 9, .NET Conf is scheduled for Nov 12-14—a free three-day virtual event, hosted by the .NET team and developer community. With a worldwide audience, the goal is to showcase the breadth of modern .NET development ease across AI, cloud-native and cross-platform apps—session catalog is now live for .NET Conf.

With .NET 9, developers will see significant enhancements across .NET Libraries, Runtime and SDKs, all toward building modern client, cloud native and intelligent apps. Tooling will get better with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, and C# continues to evolve to support the next generation of intelligent apps infused with AI.

Over the course of the three days, .NET Conf will provide a wide selection of live and recorded sessions that feature speakers from the developer community and .NET team members. Aside from core .NET content, there will be lots of showcasing of cool things developers are doing with .NET—and plenty for .NET MAUI developers. With all the wonderful updates across .NET 9, this year’s .NET Conf looks poised to be amazing. Much to look forward to for .NET developers.

.NET Conf 2024. Nov 12-14

OpenAI for .NET

It is the age of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is slowly changing the way we live and work, and AI’s popularity is driving adoption in enterprise and consumer apps. AI presents a huge opportunity for .NET developers to infuse apps with solutions powered by generative AI and large language models (LLMs), as well as boost developer productivity. There is good news for .NET developers wanting to build smart cross-platforms apps—say hello to stable release of the official OpenAI library for .NET.

Modern generative AI offers a tech-tonic shift in how AI models function and the amount of computing they operate on—and OpenAI is at the forefront of it all. Back in June, the .NET team launched the first beta of the OpenAI library for .NET, empowering developers to integrate advanced AI models into their apps. Now the stable release is out of the official OpenAI library for .NET. The library provides powerful tools that simplify integrating OpenAI’s cutting-edge models into .NET apps, offering developers a streamlined experience. Key library features include RESTful APIs, streaming completions, extensibility and support for latest OpenAI flagship models—time to build the next generation of intelligent .NET apps.

Announcing - The Official OpenAI Library for .NET - stable release

Static Content with Blazor

While .NET MAUI is squarely meant for developers to build native mobile/desktop apps, armed with modern smart WebViews, .NET MAUI is more than capable of welcoming web content to native land. In fact, Blazor/JavaScript developers should feel empowered to bring web UI components, routing, styling and more to native cross-platform .NET MAUI apps, while gaining complete native platform API access. With .NET 9, Blazor is gaining some new ways to handle static content, and Jon Hilton wrote up a nice post—static marketing/landing pages with Blazor in .NET 9.

Modern web development frameworks allow developers flexibility to choose rendering modes—the traditional pendulum swing between server-client. For .NET web developers, Blazor has interactive render modes that serve modern dynamic web apps—but marketing pages often demand fast-loading static content with strong SEO.

Jon’s article talks through static server-side rendering for landing pages. This is a nice option for Blazor developers to have various types of content co-exist within the same app. With .NET 9, there are options to exclude UI components from interactive rendering. Developers get to organize static and interactive components, all within the same project.

With Blazor Hybrid, all the Blazor goodness for web apps is welcome on native mobile/desktop apps—and with .NET 9 Blazor/.NET MAUI templates, shared Blazor UI components/styles can light up unified experiences everywhere. Developers can set up static web content to be non-interactive for web apps, and have the same assets drive local experiences on mobile/desktop—modern .NET frameworks/tooling is enabling a lot of code sharing across platforms.

Blazor client server diagram

That’s it for now.

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

Cheers developers!


SamBasu
About the Author

Sam Basu

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.

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