Sands of MAUI: Issue #83

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 excited with .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)—the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform developer experience. Going forward, developers should have much more confidence in the technology stack and tools as .NET MAUI empowers native cross-platform solutions on both mobile and desktop.

While it may take a long flight to reach the sands of MAUI island, developer excitement around .NET MAUI is quite palpable in all the shared content. Like the grains of sand, every piece of news/article/documentation/video/tutorial/livestream contributes towards developer knowledge in .NET MAUI and we grow a community/ecosystem willing to learn & 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 December 5, 2022:

.NET MAUI Recap

.NET Conf happened Nov 8-10 this year—the defacto virtual conference for all things new and cool in .NET. With .NET 7, .NET MAUI shared much of the spotlight and there was lot of awesome content from the team and community folks. Leomaris Reyes wrote up a wonderful recap of all things .NET MAUI from .NET Conf—showcasing the big announcements and topics covered.

Leomaris showcased some of the news covered in the State of .NET MAUI session hosted by David Ortinau and Maddy Montaquila. Six months since .NET MAUI went Generally Available (GA), there is a much happening—explosive growth in developer interest/adoption, performance improvements with .NET 7, product lifecycle support, tooling updates and solid showcase apps. The good news is all of the awesome .NET MAUI content from .NET Conf is now available on demand—developers can pace themselves and take it all in.

.NET MAUI Community Toolkit

.NET MAUI Community Toolkit is an open source library that contains Extensions, UI/UX Controls, Converters and Behaviors, with the soul intention of augmenting .NET MAUI development and making the lives of developers easier. A new Toolkit update is now out and Kym Phillpotts wrote up the announcement—all that's new in .NET MAUI Community Toolkit.

November has been a busy time for the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit with multiple releases featuring a ton of amazing new features and a long list of bug fixes. The latest release includes some cool new UI/UX components—like Expander View, DockLayout and StateContainer. The Samsung team has stepped up with a massive contribution to now support .NET MAUI Community Toolkit on Tizen—say hello to Toolkit UI for .NET MAUI apps running on Samsung TVs/Refrigerators.

In addition, the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit now has official support for .NET 7 and MAUI.Markup Toolkit gets an update to include Fluent C# Extension Methods for latest app development patterns. For .NET MAUI developers looking for additional productivity out of the box, the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is here to help—cheers to all the work happening on this front.

Effective Alerts in .NET MAUI

One way to keep users engaged in mobile apps is with the right kind of alerts—UX should have notifications that bring pertinent information at just the right time. Originating from Android, Toasts and Snackbars are mainstream in mobile UX these days and .NET MAUI developers would not be left behind.

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit can help and Gerald Versluis produced a wonderful new video—effective alerts with Snackbar and Toast in .NET MAUI.

Gerald starts out with the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit and explaining the differences between Snackbar/Toast. Implementing a Toast alert comes first, followed by the more interative Snackbar—Gerald shows off both alerts running on Android.

While Snackbar/Toast alerts are mostly meant for mobile apps, their implementations in the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit make them rather useful on desktop as well—Gerald is quick to point out how the alerts show up on Windows. Bottom line is, .NET MAUI developers have the needed tools to keep users engaged - effective alerts go a long way.

.NET MAUI Community Standup

The .NET MAUI Community Standups have been the regular get-together for .NET MAUI aficionados—a forum to share news and bring the developer community together. Maddy Montaquila and David Ortinau hosted the December .NET MAUI Community Standup—the last of the monthly .NET MAUI extravaganza for the year. Maddy recapped all the latest .NET MAUI news from Microsoft and the developer community—there was much to rejoice with latest release of .NET MAUI for .NET 7.

David covered tooling updates and dove into some .NET MAUI technical topics—like Custom Renderers, Handlers, Comet library and Animations. The guest of the month was a passionate .NET MAUI developer, but slightly embarrassed to stand on the shoulder of giants—the topic was polished Telerik UI for .NET MAUI.

With support for Xamarin and .NET MAUI, Telerik UI is meant to make developers more productive with hard-hitting well-engineered UI components for beautiful UX on mobile and desktop.

With solid .NET MAUI sample apps and Telerik Blazor UI now lighting up on native apps, there is no dearth of ammunition for developers to build gorgeous apps—let's go change the world.

Advent Calendars

With December, the holiday season is upon us—time to start wrapping up the year and get in the festive spirit for Christmas and New Years. One tradition to ramp up the excitement of the holidays is Advent calendars—little ways to count down the number of days before Christmas. The developer community has built up its own traditions over years—time for tech advent calendars for developers to share knowledge.

There are several wonderful advent calendars this year, contributing to specific interest areas for developers. Most notable ones for the 2022 holiday season are the C# Advent Calendar, the .NET Advent Calendar and the .NET MAUI Advent Calendar.

Each calendar promises almost a whole month of .NET related content—kudos for the developer community folks for raising their hands. Just like regular advent calendars, each day brings surprise pieces of wonderful tech articles for .NET developers. Let's all buckle up for a super fun month. Should make for tons of relaxed learning until HO-HO-HO arrives!

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!