Sands of MAUI: Issue #34

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 22, 2021:

Future of .NET

Hot off the heels of .NET 6 launch at .NET Conf, three developer advocate stooges invited an old friend to relive all the excitement: Ed Charbeneau, Alyssa Nicoll, Sam Basu and Jeff Fritz hosted the Future of .NET webinar.

This was a fun 2 hours breaking down all the big announcements from a developer's perspective and whipping up quick demos to showcase the hot bits. Discussions evolved around the significance of .NET 6, VS 2022 launch, C# 10 features, .NET MAUI updates and bringing Blazor goodness to desktop with hybrid apps. With .NET 6 carrying the LTS badge, migration and modernization would be top of mind for lot of existing apps—it was good to see an honest conversation about all the options on the table.

.NET MAUI Preview 10 Recap

How can a .NET MAUI release go by without some expected YouTube goodness? Gerald Versluis put out a video for all things .NET MAUI Preview 10 and recapped some tooling goodness with VS 2022. Gerald also went on to cover the sweet cross-platform real-time podcast app demo from .NET Conf keynote, showcasing the best of code sharing with .NET MAUI and Hybrid apps with Blazor.

One call to action is clear—if you haven't already, now is a great time to get started with .NET MAUI. The promise is coming together nicely.

.NET Updates

James Montemagno and Frank Krueger hosted the latest episode of the Merge Conflict podcast, diving into all the details of .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022 releases.

While developer excitement is palpable, it was good to see the acknowledgement that there is a lot to take in—developers may need some time to settle in with the new .NET bits and Azure cloud services. James shared some good info on some of the behind-the-scenes work that went in towards making the cross-platform podcast demo app for .NET Conf—something soon to be open sourced for developers to tinker with.

Drawn Controls in .NET MAUI

There was a ton of content from passionate developers from around the world at .NET Conf—and some real gems for those interested in .NET MAUI. Javier Suarez did a session on Drawn Controls in .NET MAUI, diving into much of the awesome work that him and the team has been putting together.

Javier started with the basics of .NET MAUI and Microsoft.Maui.Graphics library, giving developers the freedom to render native UI per their needs. Javier then dived into the meat of things—the goodness evolving from the Microsoft.Maui.Graphics.Controls library.

While experimental, this new cross-platform graphics library allows developers to render fully drawn UI components with .NET MAUI, catering to popular design systems like Cupertino, Fluent and Material. Javier showed off some cool demos and talked through performance and extensibility of drawn controls—definitely a wonderful development within the .NET MAUI stack.

MAUIAppBuilder Code

Luis Matos continues his excellent series on the MauiAppBuilder—this time diving into much of the code that now powers the bootstrapping of .NET MAUI apps using the generic .NET Builder pattern.

Luis talks about how to initialize a MauiAppBuilder instance using a Static method with default configurations and dives into the MauiAppBuilder Public API. This API is where a lot of the plumbing happens—lot of properties/configurations and a single method called Build() which creates the MauiApp. Luis dives into some tricky internal code unapologetically and teaches us a lot—looking forward to the rest of the series.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!