Welcome to the Sands of MAUI—newsletter-style issues dedicated to bringing together 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 July 26, 2021:
Gerald Versluis published another helpful video—this time catering to folks plotting migrating their Xamarin.Forms apps to .NET MAUI. With MAUI, we would see the evolution of Xamarin.Forms Renderers to the new Handler architecture—more decoupled and performant.
However, if you do have Custom Renderers in your Xamarin.Forms apps today, it should not be a blocker to migrate the app to .NET MAUI—Gerald shows off how you can do this with almost no code changes. Javier's GitHub repo on converting Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI is getting some love—while you should eventually consider moving to Handler architecture to reap the benefits, your Custom Renderers are welcome in .NET MAUI.
Xamarin Essentials has been a staple for Xamarin developers for a few years now—providing a consistent access to native APIs across device platforms. With MAUI, .NET MAUI Essentials is the future of Xamarin.Essentials—already under active development in the MAUI GitHub repo. James Montemagno laid out the seamless transition path—.NET MAUI Essentials is now directly integrated into .NET MAUI starting with .NET MAUI Preview 6. Developers simply need to bring in the Microsoft.Maui.Essentials namespace and all of the familiar APIs light up as expected. Xamarin.Essentials will be maintained through November 2022 following Xamarin.Forms life and sunset thereafter—leading the way to .NET MAUI Essentials to lead the charge going forward.
Be it Xamarin.Forms today or .NET MAUI tomorrow, continuous build/deploy pipelines are rather important for mobile/desktop apps—aka modern DevOps. Sweekriti Satpathy joined the Surfing in Maui stream to talk about all things DevOps as they relate to .NET MAUI now—from pulling down platform dependencies to producing build artifacts. Sweekriti, aka Sweeky, also talked about how solid documentation can help developers overcome fear of YAML and shared some good stories about how Xamarin customers configure build pipelines for success.
Hot off the heels of the .NET MAUI Preview 6 update, comes a fresh new release for Telerik UI for MAUI—rich UI components to light up your MAUI apps with. While in Preview mode, the Telerik suite adds a few heavy-hitting UI controls—a variety of Gauges, Barcodes, Path and Popup are now ready for you. While you can be in island time mindset for MAUI, no reason why your apps cannot look good while shipping on time—so you can get back to island relaxation.
Developer & architect Matt Goldman did an excellent session for SSW TV speaking about the full stack .NET dream and how .NET today can power applications across variety of platforms. While Matt started with some history, .NET MAUI soon took center stage as the cross-platform evolution story that should inspire developer confidence as a part of .NET. Matt also showed off a cool real-time chat app connecting a .NET MAUI app to a Blazor one through cloud services—a good taste of the future with code sharing through .NET.
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.