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 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 January 21, 2025:
The .NET MAUI team hosts monthly Community Standup livestreams to celebrate all things .NET MAUI and provide updates—a wonderful way to bring the developer community together. A lot of good things are happening in .NET MAUI as a platform, and developer community excitement is noticeable. David Ortinau and Rachel Kang hosted the first .NET MAUI Community Standup of the year—.NET MAUI 2025 Kickoff.
2024 was a wonderful year for .NET MAUI—an impactful time with stable releases, big framework updates and steady growth in adoption. With special guest Javier Suárez and some usual banter, it was time to dive into the promise of 2025 to be even bigger and share community updates that showcase developer excitement with .NET MAUI.
Javier then dived into all things new with TemplateMAUI—a set of custom templated controls for .NET MAUI. The goal is to provide developers with reusable and customizable UI components that can be easily integrated into .NET MAUI apps—Javier has some cool things cooking and showcased how developers can customize .NET MAUI UI to match design aesthetics or intended behavior. 2025 promises to be another wonderful year for .NET MAUI—the platform and the developer community grows together. Cheers.
.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. Modern apps do have to work with fleeting user attention, however, and designers/developers may consider motion in the app UX to keep users engaged. Animations are a great way to achieve this, and Héctor Pérez wrote up a wonderful article to help—advanced animations with .NET MAUI.
Héctor starts with explaining the various types of easing functions for smooth animations, like Bounce, Cubic, Sine, Spring, Linear—thankfully, all of these options for controlling the rate of change in animations is built right into the .NET MAUI framework. With some easy-to-follow code, Héctor showcases how developers can utilize easing functions in .NET MAUI—however, why stop there?
Developers can create completely custom animations in .NET MAUI, albeit with some parameters and configuration to set things up. It is also possible to stack animations in .NET MAUI for a storyboard-like behavior—multiple animations can be synchronized for order of execution to provide lively UX. Héctor showcases how developers can wire up child animations in .NET MAUI for synchronized effect in execution—an overall excellent article diving into every aspect of advanced animations in .NET MAUI.
Modern .NET is powerful, open-source, cross-platform and welcoming to all, with mature tooling accompanied by rich ecosystems. 2024 was a rather busy year in the .NET ecosystem—from new product launches to increased stability with .NET 9, developers had a lot to learn. .NET 9 was a big stable release with a lot of content created around it—while enterprises plot modernization, the developer community is likely still trying to make sense of parts of modern .NET most relevant to them. Jeff Fritz from MSFT hosted a long stream to provide developer perspective to .NET 9—the ultimate .NET Conf Recap.
During the long 5 hour live-stream, Jeff invited folks from the .NET teams and passionate developers to share all things new and cool in .NET, stemming out of .NET Conf. Speakers covered the usual updates across .NET ecosystems like AI, .NET Aspire, Blazor, C# and more—all accompanied by an engaged chatroom.
With .NET MAUI enjoying wonderful growth, there were lots of updates for .NET cross-platform developers, along with some interesting things cooking for 2025. Web developers from .NET/JS worlds are also welcome in native mobile/desktop land, thanks to .NET MAUI—modern WebViews and interops make code reuse easy. Overall, the .NET Conf wrap-up was a wonderful livestream to get .NET developers excited about the present reality with .NET, with the promise of plenty of exciting things in future.
Modern web, mobile and desktop apps often strive for delightful UX, and beautifully styled UI design is one way to achieve the goal. However, there has traditionally been some friction in the designer-developer handoff—it helps understand some basic tenets of good UX and designing software. Thankfully, experts can break down knowledge barriers, and Kathryn Grayson Nanz wrote up another UX Crash Course article—the Double Diamond Process.
The latest UX Crash Course dives into the Double Diamond Process—an iterative processes intended to evolve an idea or product through incremental improvements. The Double Diamond Process is a design framework that uses two diamond shapes to represent the problem and the solution—the goal is to repeatedly diverge to explore new ideas/research/learn and converge to bringing together what was discovered toward an aligned solution.
The first diamond represents the discovery phase—understanding the challenges to clearly define the problem at hand. In the second diamond, the iterative process continues with chosen problems—divergence brainstorms possible solutions to converge toward the best aligned one. Designers/developers might see through a full phase of defining the challenge/problem/solution—everybody else goes back to the first/second diamond to rinse and repeat.
.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. However, .NET MAUI is only a small slice of the bigger .NET ecosystem—there is plenty of innovation and developer love across various parts of the Microsoft technology stack. And looking at the bigger software developer market, .NET is only one stack—there is plenty of development happening across various other technologies and programming languages. Software developers have much to learn and be inspired from—NDC London 2025 is here to help.
NDC has a history of inspiring developers since 2008, and 2025 seems all set to begin nicely with NDC London. With 90 speakers, 100+ sessions, 12 workshops and plenty of networking, there will be a lot for developers from various backgrounds to soak in. For .NET developers in the house, there will be plenty of content around AI, Blazor, .NET MAUI, .NET Aspire and more, from .NET team members and MVPs/community advocates. Developers can also benefit from lots of face-time at Microsoft and Progress booths—live demos, engaging conversations, lots of learning and fun awaits everyone at NDC London.
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.