Sands of MAUI: Issue #25

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.

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 toward 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 September 20, 2021:

.NET MAUI GA Timeline

.NET MAUI is the evolution of Xamarin.Forms into a modern cross-platform framework for targeting mobile and desktop apps from single codebase. .NET MAUI is also a big promise, and cross-platform tooling has lots of dependencies from various teams—VS engineering, XAML experience, MAUI folks and, of course, bits from Apple and Google.

This takes a lot of collaboration, and things are coming along nicely with Preview bits for .NET 6, .NET MAUI and VS tooling. The MAUI timeline was aggressive though, and it may be better to take the time to do things right the first time around for optimal developer experience. While the core framework/runtime pieces are getting ready, .NET MAUI tooling depends on key stable product releases across both Windows and Mac.

Scott Hunter provided an update on .NET MAUI—GA timeline of .NET MAUI has been pushed back to early spring/summer of next year. In the bigger scheme of things, this caters to better quality of platform and tooling experience for developers. The .NET MAUI deliverables are also better aligned early next year to provide all of the underlying foundational pieces ready for production use, thus inspiring enterprise investment and confidence in app migration/modernization.

.NET 6 RC1 Release

.NET 6 represents the journey to unify the .NET platform runtimes, libraries and SDKs. With November 2021 GA, .NET 6 unifies the Mono runtime into .NET Core, while providing a single SDK for consistent developer experience. .NET 6 RC1 is now out with the first “Go Live” license, along with .NET MAUI Preview 8 and Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4.

While Scott’s post provides an outline of the bigger updates, Rich Lander wrote a .NET RC1 release post—true to reputation, a lengthy post that unabashedly dives into hardcore technical details that power the .NET 6 journey.

.NET MAUI Migration

If you have been tinkering with .NET MAUI, the last release was Preview 7 and now we have Preview 8. If you had started app building with .NET MAUI, what would be the migration story from Preview 7 to 8?

Turns out, this is not so difficult and there are formal guidelines in place. .NET MAUI now aligns with ASP.NET/Blazor with the usage of host builder pattern—Startup.cs has been renamed to MauiProgram.cs with some updates. Also, the Windows platform support is now part of the .NET MAUI single project—cheers to developer experience consistency.

Prism.MAUI Update

Fan of Prism Library and been using it for Xamarin.Forms? Good news—you’ll have Prism.MAUI to move the goodness forward. Dan Siegel has had Preview bits out for a while, and tooling stability in .NET MAUI Preview 8 has made it possible to move Prism.MAUI forward. Pending community discussions and review, Dan has a new Preview out for Prism.MAUI that supports .NET 6 RC1 and .NET MAUI Preview 8—give it a spin and chime in.

ASP.NET Core Updates

With .NET MAUI, web technologies are welcome in native mobile/desktop apps—Blazor leads the way with Blazor Hybrid apps and the BlazorWebView component. With the .NET 6 RC1 release, there are a bunch of awesome ASP.NET Core updates—many of these have interesting connotations when sharing code with web technologies like Blazor, JavaScript or SPA apps.

Daniel Roth wrote about all the ASP.NET Core goodness—rendering Blazor components from JS, Blazor custom elements, template improvements, minimal API updates and much more.

That’s it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!