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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 January 27, 2025:

State of .NET

As 2025 rolls in, .NET developers are sitting comfy with stable release of .NET 9 last November. There are, however, lots of moving parts in modern .NET technology stack, and, as enterprises plot modernization, it is always good to provide developer perspective. A recent webinar hosted by Ed Charbeneau and an aging developer might be helpful—say hello to State of .NET 9 for app modernization.

The goal was to cover all things new and cool with .NET, with an eye toward AI integrations. The .NET 9 release saw updates to major app development stacks like .NET MAUI, Blazor, .NET Aspire and more, along with tooling updates and performance tuning. The webinar covered what developers should pay attention to if trying to modernize .NET apps, in particular, code reuse across web/native apps. It is, however, the age of AI and modern .NET welcomes plenty of ways of integration with cloud AI services or working with local AI models—some fun demos tried to push the envelope of what’s possible with .NET

Modernizing Apss: The State of .NET 9

Document Processing

.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. As developers create modern mobile/desktop experiences, most enterprise workflows demand handling documents—creation, manipulation and detailed APIs are needed to help handle popular document types. PDF documents continue to dominate many standardized workflows, but can be notoriously difficult to manage programmatically. Telerik Document Processing Library can help, and Anna Velcheva wrote up an article—easy conversions to PDF for modern workflows across web/native app platforms.

PDF is a popular file format allowing creators full control over document content and high fidelity rendering. However, PDF standard specifications are daunting and programmatic PDF management is not realistic for most development teams. Progress Telerik Document Processing Libraries (DPL) are a set of .NET libraries which provide APIs for creation/manipulation of commonly used file formats—like DOCX, TXT, PDF, XLSX, CSV and other document types.

As Anna explained, the magic happens with the help of each file format having its own class with providers/renderers—detailed specifications for each type of document is encoded for easy creation/manipulation of documents, as well as import/export. Anna demonstrates the flexibility of DPL in showcasing easy conversions to PDF from DOCX, HTML, XSLX and more—each with easy API usage and high fidelity rendering. The benefits of Telerik DPL can be surfaced up in any type of .NET stack for web/mobile/desktop/cross-platform apps—easy document processing is here to augment developer productivity.

Document Processing Libraries Telerik Ninja illustration

.NET 9 Updates

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. Thankfully, Microsoft Learn has a single landing page that lists all the updates in one place—what’s new in .NET 9.

.NET 9 was a big stable release with a lot of content created around it with .NET Conf—the developer community is likely still trying to make sense of parts of modern .NET most relevant to them. With .NET 9, there were big updates to core .NET pieces, like .NET runtime, libraries and SDKs, along with corresponding tooling changes. There were the obvious updates to .NET developer platforms like .NET MAUI, Blazor, .NET Aspire, ASP.NET, EF, WPF, WinForms and more, along with language modernization with C# 13 and F# 9.

With .NET 9, there is a new unified layer of C# abstractions through Microsoft.Extensions.AI—this is meant to facilitate integration with AI services, including small and large language models (SLMs and LLMs), embeddings, vector stores and middleware. While there is a lot for developers to consume, it is nice to have a single landing page with all things new in .NET 9.

Microsoft Learn: Discover what's new in .NET 9

Easy APIs

.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. Modern mobile/desktop apps do not, however, live in a silo—any real-world app depends on services outside the app. Data is king and developers need to build services that connect the app to backend data—the most common way is creating APIs.

Building an API layer from scratch, however, can be laborious and error-prone, and often requires deep knowledge of data repository. Thankfully, there is plenty of tooling help, and Assis Zang wrote up an article—creating complete APIs with Visual Studio scaffolding.

Scaffolding, in the context of technology, is a concept that refers to an approach or tool used to accelerate software development by providing a basic structure or skeleton for the code. Assis starts with the advantages of scaffolding in ASP.NET Core—tooling can assist in automatic code generation, code standardization, EF integration and speeding up development.

For .NET developers building client apps, the backend service layer is commonly an API that connects to data. Assis walks through setting up an ASP.NET Core Web API project from scratch using scaffolding. There is Visual Studio tooling help in how developers can choose data entities or code first EF pattern to scaffold code that performs CRUD operations on data—the usual Create/Read/Update/Delete functions needed to work with a database.

DBContext classes can minimize code errors and EF Core Migrations can generate needed database scripts—while tooling helps a lot, developers need to be mindful. As Assis points out, Progress Telerik Fiddler Everywhere is a wonderful tool to test everything about an API service once ready—developers should inspect all operations against the backend data store, before consuming APIs from client apps.

ASP.NET Core

Swetugg

Modern .NET is a large ecosystem with plenty for developers to learn and stay up on top of. And for developers to be inspired and learning from peers, nothing beats an in-person tech conference—wonderful things happen when passionate folks exchange ideas. For developers in Sweden and neighboring Scandinavian region, there is excitement coming right up—Swetugg Stockholm 2025 is happening Feb. 4-5.

Swetugg is a tech conference by .NET developers, for .NET developers—Swetugg has a long history of inspiring developers. With more than 50 passionate speakers from all over the world and caring organizers, Swetugg Stockholm 2025 promises to be a great experience for developers. For .NET developers, there will be plenty of content around AI, Blazor, .NET MAUI, .NET Aspire, latest in C# and more. Developers are sure to benefit from two days of immersive learning and networking—come see us at the Progress booth for live demos and engaging conversations. Lots of learning and fun awaits everyone at Swetugg Stockholm 2025—see you there.

Swetugg

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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