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 March 29, 2021:
Earlier in the month, MAUI program managers Maddy Leger and David Ortinau hosted the monthly Xamarin Community Standup. On the agenda was latest news, recap Pull Requests and .NET MAUI timeline updates. They were joined by Brandon Minnick, cloud developer advocate, who loves building Xamarin apps with straight up C# UI—check out GitTrends, an app that provides GitHub repo traffic insights.
The awesome Gerald Versluis joined Sam Basu on a recent .NET Dev Show to talk about the latest in Xamarin Community Toolkit. The Xamarin Community Toolkit is a collection of reusable elements for mobile development with Xamarin.Forms, including animations, behaviors, converters, effects, and UI helpers. While we wait for .NET MAUI, Xamarin Community Toolkit is here to help with common developer tasks when building apps with Xamarin.Forms—some wonderful folks working to make things better for the community.
Want to have a say about the future of .NET, .NET MAUI and the overall ecosystem? The .NET Foundation is running a State of .NET developer survey—you only got a couple of days left in March to make your voice heard. You make an impact and earn some good developer karma—what's holding you back?
You may be wondering—should you invest to learn Xamarin with C#/XAML today or wait until everything is flushed out with .NET MAUI? Well, our beloved Xamarin spokesperson James Montemagno did a whole video about this dilemma—it is well worth your time. Hint: Your Xamarin skills carry nicely into .NET MAUI and the funnel opens up with new programming paradigms. Your investment into future can begin today.
Xamarin Essentials has become ubiquitous with modern Xamarin development. Bundled in with most Xamarin project templates or available as a NuGet package, Xamarin Essentials provides developers with consistent cross-platform APIs for Android, iOS, and UWP—all from the convenience of shared C#, irrespective of the UI stack. Do you wonder about the future of Xamarin Essentials with .NET MAUI? Arguably, .NET MAUI has an even bigger need for consistent device API access across various programming paradigms. Might we envision a dependency on .NET MAUI Essentials? We'll leave you with this part of the .NET MAUI repo to poke around yourself ... they say you can see flowers bloom if you whisper to them.
That's it for now.
We'll see you next week with more awesome content relevant to .NET MAUI.
Cheers developers!
Sam Basu is a technologist, author, speaker, Microsoft MVP, gadget-lover and Progress Developer Advocate for Telerik products. With a long developer background, he now spends much of his time advocating modern web/mobile/cloud development platforms on Microsoft/Telerik technology stacks. His spare times call for travel, fast cars, cricket and culinary adventures with the family. You can find him on the internet.