Sands of MAUI: Issue #29

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 October 18, 2021:

.NET MAUI Preview 9

Behold, the next iteration of .NET MAUI—say hello to Preview 9. David Ortinau wrote up the announcement showcasing all the new hotness in .NET MAUI Preview 9, now running on top of .NET 6 RC2 and with VS 2022 Preview 5 tooling. New in this .NET MAUI release are updated implementations of several controls—BoxView, IndicatorView, ImageButton and WebView.

Adding to the UI jazz are new visual effects—Borders, Corners and Shadows, all powered by the new Microsoft.Maui.Graphics library with UI drawing APIs across platforms. Startup times for Android apps get a much needed boost with Startup Tracing which partially AOTs only the parts of your application executed during startup—thus achieving a balance between speed and app size optimization.

.NET 6 Release Candidate 2

The latest .NET MAUI and ASP.NET Core release goodness stands on the shoulder of .NET—.NET 6 RC2 is now out. The RC2 release focuses on quality improvements and carries a 'go live' license for production apps—Rich Lander wrote up the usual detailed .NET 6 RC2 announcement post. .NET 6 ushers in C# 10—the next evolution of the mature C# language.

C# 10 features cater to developer productivity by extending existing capabilities of Records/Properties and enabling Global usings for less boilerplate code. .NET 6 will launch during .NET Conf November 9-11, with VS 2022 launch on Nov 8—.NET devs have a lot to look forward to.

.NET MAUI Community Toolkit Contributions

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit aims to elevate the developer experience with .NET MAUI by providing most commonly needed artifacts ready out of the box. While the core Toolkit team collaborates with .NET teams at Microsoft to move things forward, the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is very much a community effort.

To that end, Brandon Minnick wrote up the guidelines to contribute to the open source .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—the whole process of creating a new feature is a well documented workflow. Most of the Approved Proposals have been community-driven and implementation help through approved contributions are much appreciated.

.NET MAUI Overview

Excited about all the .NET MAUI news and not sure where to get started? Melissa Houghton recently spoke at Microsoft Reactor Sydney on .NET MAUI—a great overview of all things .NET MAUI. The talk covered latest news around .NET MAUI and the journey of evolution from Xamarin.Forms, diving into the productivity and performance gains that .NET MAUI brings to the table.

Melissa also talked about how Blazor plays into the .NET MAUI story of sharing code and showed off latest bits—this is a nice way to get started if you are new to the .NET MAUI world.

Mobile Game with Xamarin.Forms

Developer Shaun Lawrence has built an excellent wordsearch game for Android/iOS with Xamarin.Forms and shared the developer experience during XamExpertDay. Curious to get a detailed look and a step by step guideline on how to build mobile games with Xamarin.Forms? Shaun recently started a blog series to walk developers through building a demo application, while discussing some of the concepts applied for sanity and maximum code reuse.

Real-world apps/games written with Xamarin.Forms require developers to have a handle on a myriad of things, like Data layer, MVVM support, Styling, UI paradigms, Behaviors, Effects and many more—Shaun would cover all the juicy details in upcoming blog posts. Be inspired, developers.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!