Sands of MAUI: Issue #33

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 November 15, 2021:

.NET 6

Welcome to .NET 6. After a year of work from the .NET teams and the developer community, .NET 6 is out in full glory and proudly carries the Long Term Support (LTS) badge. Richard Lander wrote up the epic .NET 6 announcement post and the key point to take away is massive gains in performance.

.NET 6 is the first .NET release that natively supports Apple Silicon for MacOS and Windows Arm64, paving the path for .NET apps to run on new frontiers. .NET 6 is a massive unification effort with web, cloud, desktop, IoT and mobile apps all using the same .NET Libraries—this makes it easy for developers to share code easily across apps/platforms.

Tooling for .NET 6 development gets better across the board, with Hot Reload support everywhere and tons of new language features in C# 10 and F# 6. Just one word sums it all up: yay!

.NET MAUI Preview 10

Sitting pretty on top of stable .NET 6 LTS runtime is the next iteration of .NET MAUI—Preview 10 is now out. David Ortinau wrote up the post announcing .NET MAUI Preview 10. The key to note here is how easy it is to get started. The best developer experience with .NET MAUI is through the latest Visual Studio 2022 Preview 17.1, which shipped alongside the GA VS 2022 17.0 version.

All one has to do to get started is to install the 'Mobile development with .NET' workload during VS 2022 setup—all of the .NET MAUI dependencies and mobile platform runtimes/SDKs/simulators are included with a simple checkbox.

.NET MAUI Preview 10 release brings in the Handler implementations of the popular CollectionView and IndicatorView controls, as well as property implementations and improvements with a bunch of other UI controls. The .NET MAUI GA goal is looking closer every single day with platform and tooling updates.

.NET Conf 2021 Keynote

Modern .NET is the developer platform for building anything for anywhere and nothing celebrates .NET quite like .NET Conf. In its 11th year, .NET Conf was held Nov 9-11 this year—2 days of awesome content from Microsoft folks, before a full 24 hours of non-stop livestream with passionate community speakers from all around the world.

Scott Hunter opened .NET Conf with a wonderful keynote, tapping into some well-known faces from the .NET team and together, they did kick up the excitement around the .NET ecosystem. The keynote covered a plethora of topics—.NET 6, C# 10, Minimal APIs, Blazor updates, .NET MAUI updates, Hybrid Apps with Blazor/.NET MAUI, Azure support and a whole lot more. Want to get the latest scoop on .NET? This is the keynote to start with.

Introduction to .NET MAUI

After the .NET Conf keynote, Maddy Leger Montaquila took the stage to talk about something dear to all our hearts—all things.NET MAUI. Maddy started with the basics and provided the latest updates with .NET MAUI Preview 10, including the ease of development with Windows Subsystem for Android.

Tooling for .NET MAUI is catching up fast. While Maddy may be a little uncomfortably fond of her Mac, Hot Reload (both XAML and C#) is starting to work just about everywhere. Add the promise of Hybrid apps bringing Blazor goodness and code sharing into desktop, you can see why developers and enterprises cannot wait for the .NET MAUI GA release coming early next year.

C# 10

No matter the platform or tooling, developer experience is largely shaped by the programming language—C# does not disappoint for .NET MAUI. Along with .NET 6 and VS 2022 launch comes the next language update—welcome to C# 10. Kathleen Dollard wrote up the C# 10 announcement post—covering all the features that make your code run faster and be more prettier/expressive.

The plethora of improvements in C# 10 include some key features that aid in big mobile/cross-platform projects—such as Global Usings, Implicit Usings, File-scoped namespaces, Improvements for Lambda expressions, better parity between Structs and Classes and more. C# 10 is here to allow .NET MAUI developers write cleaner and more easily maintainable code.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!