Sands of MAUI: Issue #190

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 June 23, 2025:

Scheduler for .NET MAUI

.NET MAUI is built to enable .NET developers to create cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, with deep platform integrations, native UI and hybrid web experiences. Modern app users demand rich UX from cross-platform apps, and developers can use all the help—.NET MAUI and Telerik UI are here to oblige. Staying organized is one of the challenges of modern life, and Leomaris Reyes wrote up a wonderfully relevant article—integrating Scheduler UI in .NET MAUI apps.

The Telerik Scheduler UI for .NET MAUI is a smart organizational tool with customizable and predesigned calendar views. It allows users to manage dates effortlessly, along with appointments, time rules, special time slots and a lot more. Developers can implement it easily and benefit from a rich feature set, starting with built-in calendar views—like Day, Week, Multi-Day and Month.

Leomaris showcases the developer experience in building an educational .NET MAUI app from scratch—it is easy to bring in Telerik UI and render the Scheduler UI. The anatomy of the Scheduler exposes the complexity of the UI—the real power is in flexible API for developers. Leomaris demonstrates how to customize calendar views with the Scheduler, as well as hinting toward globalization and localization support, along with a flexible styling API.

Developers needing calendar views with customizable appointments/events/scheduling requirements have all the ammunition to deliver wonderful cross-platform UX—Telerik Scheduler UI for .NET MAUI does it all.

.NET 10 Update

Modern .NET is powerful, open-source, cross-platform and welcoming to all, with mature tooling accompanied by rich ecosystems. With .NET settling on a yearly cadence, there are fresh new bits for developers every November—the work starts early in the year though. The .NET teams at Microsoft have been working toward the next iteration of .NET and have taken further steps—say hello to .NET 10 Preview 5.

The fifth preview release of .NET 10 adds some big enhancements across the .NET Runtime, SDK, libraries, C# and developer frameworks like ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Aspire, .NET MAUI, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and more. For .NET MAUI developers, the latest .NET release includes lots of fixes and testing updates that should contribute toward platform stability. As the year rolls along, .NET developers can expect a steady cadence of .NET 10 Previews until General Availability in November. As the much beloved .NET platform heads toward the next big release, developers will have much to stay tuned to—upwards and onwards.

.NET MAUI Toolkit 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. Building apps for mobile/desktop from a shared codebase is intrinsically tricky and developers could use some extras to light up solid user experiences—Telerik UI and .NET MAUI Community Toolkit can provide the needed boost. Héctor Pérez wrote a nice article exploring how developers can implement seemingly difficult things with ease, given the right tools—examining APIs in .NET MAUI Community Toolkit Essentials.

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is a collection of reusable elements designed to simplify and enhance .NET MAUI app development—it includes a variety of components such as animations, behaviors, converters, effects and helpers, which are commonly used across multiple applications. Héctor starts with the basics of Toolkit Essentials and the available APIs—AppTheme Resources, Badge, FolderPicker, FileSaver and SpeechToText. These would all be tricky for developers to implement cross-platform, but available as easy abstractions with .NET MAUI Community Toolkit Essentials.

Héctor showcases the developer experience in creating a practice .NET MAUI project with Telerik UI and brings in .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—each of the APIs are implemented and tested in a sample app with easy to follow code. Switching up app themes, accessing file system, selecting folders and working with Native Speech to Text—all become easy for .NET MAUI developers with the help of .NET MAUI Community Toolkit Essentials. Developer productivity through useful libraries and API abstractions—what’s not to like?

AI Coding Assistants

It is the age of AI, and there is a huge opportunity for .NET developers to infuse apps with solutions powered by generative AI and large/small language models. Modern AI is also opportunity to streamline and automate developer workflows for better productivity. AI does not, however, negate the need for well-engineered UI, and there is good news for folks using Telerik UI for Blazor for .NET apps or KendoReact for JavaScript developers. James Montemagno hosted a On .NET show with an aging developer to talk about AI-powered developer productivity—say hello to Telerik and KendoUI AI Coding Assistants.

Today’s AI models/agents have come a long way, but developer productivity benefits are often hampered by inaccurate subpar AI responses to coding prompts—context really matters. There are brand new AI coding assistants for Telerik UI for Blazor and KendoReact—available both as GitHub Copilot Extension or MCP Server/Tool. The goal is high-accuracy AI code generation and contextual grounding, powered by documentation, API canvas and lots of sample code.

The show dove into the developer experience for both .NET/JS developers—both in Ask/Chat and Agent modes, AI can help developers write better code faster, with contextual intelligence providing the much needed accuracy.

AI Help in Xcode

Cross-platform and native app developers use a variety of IDEs to build for target platforms—XCode remains the dominant tool for folks building apps for Apple ecosystem. GitHub Copilot is already one of the most popular and productive coding assistants for developers—an AI pair programmer that helps developers write better code, now supercharged with Agent mode. There is good news for developers building iOS/macOS/WatchOS apps for Apple ecosystems, and Jialuo Gan wrote up the announcement—GitHub Copilot’s Agent Mode and MCP Support are now in public preview for Xcode.

In Agent mode, GitHub Copilot understands the entire codebase and can recognize/fix errors automatically, suggest and execute terminal commands, and analyze/fix run-time errors until the assigned developer task is complete. Developers can simply chat with GitHub Copilot using natural language and conversationally, get it to complete multistep, complex coding tasks. As with anything in AI, mileage may vary.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) promises standardized communications to provide AI models/agents with deep contextual knowledge and bolster confidence in performing tasks with customized tools—MCP support in GitHub Copilot also works in XCode now. GitHub Copilot has broad developer reach and increasing in popularity across IDEs—developers across various IDEs can now benefit from AI-powered productivity.

That’s it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!