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 August 23, 2021:
The MVVM design pattern has always been popular with C#/XAML codebases and .NET MAUI would continue the trend. In fact, the design decisions in how .NET MAUI apps are bootstrapped further embraces MVVM patterns and interface-based architectures. Started out with code-behind code in Xamarin.Forms and now have a lot of it? Gerald Versluis is here for the rescue with a video on how to migrate tightly coupled code over to MVVM friendly architectures.
Gerald starts with explaining the pitfalls of code-behind logic and how to adopt MVVM as a mindset. Not stopping at theoretical knowledge, Gerald also moves on to implement basic MVVM data binding with a ViewModel
and also hooking up UI updates through INotifyPropertyChanged
.
Been a fan of the Xamarin podcast? Well, it is evolving to...surprise, the .NET MAUI podcast—focusing on .NET, .NET MAUI & Azure. The same troublemakers will be hosts—James Montemagno, Matt Soucoup & David Ortinau. The first episode of the .NET MAUI podcast got published recently—diving into the .NET MAUI release, Visual Studio 2022 and Azure updates. Give it a listen, folks.
While you may have hopefully had the opportunity to enjoy some sun at Maui-like tropical destinations, engineers at Microsoft and Progress Telerik have been hard at work trying to make tools that will make your lives easier come fall with .NET MAUI. Hot off the last .NET MAUI release, comes a new summer release of Telerik UI for MAUI suite—adding to the polished performant UI components you can light up your .NET MAUI apps with.
This latest Telerik suite release brings full support .NET MAUI Preview 7 and an customizable Entry UI component. And one more thing—the Telerik GRID is here! DataGrids are ubiquitous and developers were already feeling the need for a polished Grid in .NET MAUI. The Telerik MAUI DataGrid allows you to easily visualize and edit tabular-represented data right in your .NET MAUI apps. And it is a Telerik DataGrid for sure—full featured with flexibility, easy APIs and fine-tuned performance.
The Xamarin Guy published a wonderful video on how to get started with .NET MAUI Preview 7. The walkthrough of the developer setup started with Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3.1 installation and quickly moved on to initiating/running/hot reloading the first .NET MAUI app on an Android emulator in Windows. Firing up the .NET MAUI app on iOS required VS to connect to a Mac host for the build/deploy—all covered seamlessly in this developer-facing walkthrough. Kudos.
It is difficult to keep Gerald Versluis away for long when in comes to .NET MAUI news—this time, he is joined by Brandon Minnick. The two combined to host an Ask the Experts session on Microsoft Learn.TV around the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit. Just like the Xamarin Community Toolkit, the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is open sourced & community supported—Brandon & Gerald answered lots of questions from the chatroom with honesty & humor.
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.