Sands of MAUI: Issue #58

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 May 23, 2022:

.NET MAUI Crash Course

With .NET MAUI getting ready for General Availability (GA) and runtime/tooling stabilizing, there are a lot of developers wanting to learn. And for folks just getting into .NET MAUI, one has to break down things to the basics—what is the runtime, the promise, how to get started and how to be productive building cross-platform mobile/desktop apps?

Gerald Versluis is here for the rescue—with a full on .NET MAUI crash course.

What is called for is beginning with .NET MAUI basics and quickly ramping up to real-world concepts. That's exactly what Gerald delivers in the wonderful crash course—starting with breaking down the framework promise, getting started experience, project structure, databinding, navigation and using platform APIs. There are plenty of tips and tricks along the way—developers watching the full crash course in order, are destined for a solid understanding of .NET MAUI and being set up for success.

.NET MAUI Courseware

Are you the type of developer who learns best by doing things? There is good news for folks wanting to dip their feet into .NET MAUI—a full Microsoft Learn courseware on building cross-platform mobile/desktop apps. You'll learn the fundamentals of building an app with .NET MAUI and more advanced topics such as local data storage or invoking REST-based web services.

The courseware is nicely broken down into bite-sized learning modules for easy follow along—getting started with .NET MAUI, creating interactive styled UI with XAML, customizing visual layouts, app navigation with Tabs/Flyout, using REST services and working with local data storage using SQLite. Developers new to .NET MAUI now have a step by step courseware on how to get hands-on experience with building apps with .NET MAUI. Cheers to more learning and developer success.

.NET MAUI Modes

Most mobile/desktop users have strong preferences on how their screen lights up with content—this is commonly driven by light or dark modes. The system theme is not only a popular preference, but also important to users with accessibility needs. It is imperative that app developers try to honor the system theme of light/dark mode and thankfully, .NET MAUI makes it easy.

Leomaris Reyes wrote an article on how to have .NET MAUI apps adapt to the system appearance—for being inclusive to user needs and consistency of user experience.

Leomaris starts out with platform compatibility for supporting light/dark modes—it is good to know which OS versions have support for the system theme across iOS/MacOS/Android/Windows. The key in .NET MAUI is to use the AppThemeBinding markup extension—this allows for specifying a set of resources for both light and dark modes. Our apps can identify the system setting and apply styling appropriate to light/dark mode.

Developers have the option of riding the requested system-wide theme for colors or apply style resources appropriately. Supporting light/dark modes in .NET MAUI apps is easy—and a must-do for developers to make for friendly user experience.

.NET MAUI Content

One of the best indicators of a framework's popularity amongst developers is community involvement and the amount of content being created. The Xamarin ecosystem has always been great—Steven Thewissen had done the awesome Xamarin UI July back in 2019. It was essentially an advent type calendar, where each day throughout the month, an insightful Xamarin blog post was published. Matt Goldman wants to repeat the feat for .NET MAUI and announced .NET MAUI UI July.

The goal is simple—through all of July, a community-contributed blog post or video would be published each day. Matt has started a calendar and developers can sign up for content—anything innovative and educational around .NET MAUI is welcome.

This should be a month of lot of fun and some great developer content—big cheers for the initiative.

.NET MAUI @ Techorama

Interested/excited about .NET MAUI and live in Europe? As developer conferences come back to in-person shows, there is a big one on the horizon—Techorama BE is happening May 23-25 in Antwerp Belgium. Techorama promises three days of wonderful developer content with speakers and attendees from all over. Also the show is Vegas-themed—so developers can expect fun content, food/drink, wheel of fortune and prizes.

What's in it for .NET MAUI enthusiasts? Glad you asked—some folks very passionate about .NET MAUI would be there, like Gerald Versluis, James Clancey, James Montemagno (remote) and yours truly. Developers can expect plenty of .NET MAUI love—from basics to advanced, Blazor Hybrid apps, Comet and migration/modernization strategies.

The folks from Telerik UI for .NET MAUI team will be there as well—expect island themed swag to be won Vegas-style. Techorama promises to be a lot of fun for developers—hope you can join.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!