Sands of MAUI: Issue #167

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 November 18, 2024:

.NET 9 is Here

Modern .NET is powerful, open-source, cross-platform and welcoming to all, with mature tooling accompanied by rich ecosystems. The next big release of .NET has been in the works for some time. Post Release Candidate milestones, .NET has been getting final touches around performance, stability and additional optimizations. Say hello to .NET 9, now Generally Available—and all the excitement was captured during the 2024 .NET Conf Keynote.

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

James Montemagno kicked off the keynote with an overview of where .NET stands. It is impressive to see how many technology stacks are powered by .NET today and, the constant investments in performance and developer productivity. Next up, it was time to dive into several technology platforms within .NET—with Maddy Montaquila playing host, the teams provided updates on .NET Aspire, AI enhancements, .NET MAUI, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio tooling. The keynote was a great recap of all the goodness included in .NET 9—developers have all the ammunition from modern .NET to go change the world.

.NET MAUI Updates

.NET MAUI is built to enable .NET developers to create cross-platform apps for Android, iOS macOS and Windows, with deep native integrations, platform-native UI and hybrid experiences. More and more developers are using .NET MAUI to build native cross-platform mobile and desktop apps, and .NET 9 is here to continue improving business-critical app experiences. David Ortinau and Rachel Kang took the stage at .NET Conf to cover all the updates—what’s new in .NET MAUI with .NET 9.

The duo started with a recap of Microsoft’s investment is client-side technologies—it has been a year of growth for .NET MAUI all around. Adoption numbers for .NET MAUI are at an all-time high, and developer engagement is impressive. With stability comes more success stories of companies using .NET MAUI to build production apps, and that inspires more confidence.

Next up was a deeper dive into .NET MAUI enhancements with .NET 9—there’s new UI help, app lifecycle improvements, performance tuning and better platform integrations. The duo also covered tooling updates for developers and provided a peek into .NET MAUI roadmap for the future—now is as good a time as any to be a cross-platform developer with .NET. Upwards and onwards with .NET MAUI.

Hybrid Apps with .NET MAUI

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, there are goodies for developers wanting to mix web and native technology stacks, and Beth Massi took the stage with Eilon Lipton at .NET Conf to cover the updates—build hybrid apps with .NET MAUI.

The simple goal with .NET 9 is better code sharing between .NET MAUI and Blazor—web UI components and styles can power the experiences on web apps, as well as cross-platform mobile/desktop apps. Beth walked through the developer experience with the new Blazor Hybrid and Web app template. The key is the shared library between Blazor/.NET MAUI apps that houses all the shared UI/styles across platforms.

The template also points developers to a preferred way of catering to web/native experiences—common interfaces can have varied implementations for Blazor/.NET MAUI worlds. Eilon also talked through the new HybridWebView UI in .NET MAUI—it is now easier than ever for .NET/JS to communicate, paving the way to welcome more web content to cross-platform hybrid apps.

Day-0 Telerik Support

Modern mobile/desktop clients or web frontends are complicated—developers can use all the help available to stay productive. Progress Software maintains a suite of UI components and libraries/tools to help developers be more successful—Telerik UI for all things .NET, and Kendo UI for all things JavaScript. Enterprise workflows also demand sophisticated networking, reporting, testing and mocking needs—Progress offers dedicated tooling to enable development teams across such fronts. Modern times call for deep AI integrations—responsible, hallucination-free applications of AI that optimize business workflows, enhance app UX and keep developers productive. There is now Day-Zero support for .NET 9 across all Telerik UI components, Document Processing Libraries (DPL) and Reporting tools—developers expect nothing less.

The Telerik journey with .NET 9 started with early preview releases—not just making sure product updates are compatible with latest .NET 9, but leveraging platform features to squeeze out every bit of performance from .NET. Slated officially for Nov. 20, 2024, the latest release breaks new ground in UI development with professionally built design system assets, advanced data-driven visualizations and Day-Zero support for the latest .NET and JavaScript frameworks. Keen-eyed active license holders can grab the November update from Account/Downloads or update NuGet package references directly within projects.

With the late fall release, design and development teams will find solutions to emerging problems, like the design-to-code handoff, while providing smooth data-driven experiences, support for .NET 9, Angular 19, KendoReact integration with Astro and more. The Telerik release packs a lot of new enterprise-ready UI components with support for the latest runtimes—across ASP.NET Core, Blazor, .NET MAUI, WinUI, WPF, WinForms and more. The Telerik UI for .NET MAUI suite earns a whole bunch of fresh new UI components, with DatePager and GridSplitter controls leading the way and a brand-new theming mechanism. Developers should have much to celebrate in the big release with hot new bits and three release webinars to unpack all the goodness for developer productivity across .NET/JS.

Fidelity Using .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. Any emerging development framework loves to see success stories—being able to meet demanding enterprise app needs adds to developer confidence. There is big news for .NET MAUI developers—Fidelity is leveraging .NET MAUI to re-envision it’s most challenging and popular ActiveTrader Pro trading app. This is wonderful validation of .NET MAUI’s maturity, and David Ortinau sat down with Matthew Faust and Kevin Bieri during .NET Conf—how Fidelity uses .NET MAUI for cross-platform desktop app development.

The conversation started with Fidelity’s popular data-dense desktop app that facilitates high-velocity stock trading and has extreme performance demands with real-time streaming data. With a long history of evolution through C++, Silverlight and finally a successful WPF app, Fidelity’s need to be on Windows and macOS natively meant an engineering rewrite—.NET MAUI was the obvious developer framework of choice.

The core of the app UI is powered by Telerik UI for .NET MAUI—extreme performance-tuned DataGrids with Skia rendering, ComboBoxes, Popups and numerous other UI components that elevate UX and cater to fast transactions the industry demands. It has not been an easy road—boundaries have been pushed with a lot of engineering effort from Fidelity and .NET MAUI teams at Microsoft/Progress. While there is a long way to go, the ActiveTrader Pro Beta results are already impressive—.NET MAUI is powering one of the most popular desktop apps in the market.

Success fuels confidence, and developer enthusiasm is high with .NET MAUI—let the evolution continue toward even higher growth and developer success.

That’s it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!