Sands of MAUI: Issue #68

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 August 15, 2022:

.NET MAUI Tooling Update

There is big news around .NET MAUI tooling for developers—Visual Studio (VS) 2022 17.3 is now generally available on Windows and along with it, comes formal VS tooling for .NET MAUI.

Lining up with .NET MAUI Focus on MAUI livestream, Maddy Montaquila wrote up the announcement—.NET MAUI tooling is no longer in preview. Along with tooling updates comes a new release of. NET MAUI SDK—the fifth release since May General Availability (GA) delivers stability improvements.

Developers now have full access to VS productivity features towards building cross-platform native apps with .NET faster than ever, and ship them to Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, from a single shared codebase. Full VS tooling for .NET MAUI has taken a lot of engineering effort and substantial efforts have been made to speed up the developer inner loop.

The goal is to allow developers make continual incremental code/markup edits without having to wait—features like XAML Hot Reload, .NET Hot Reload, Live Visual Tree and XAML Live Preview are all here to help developers be more productive. Visual Studio for Mac tooling for .NET MAUI also gets an update—Visual Studio 2022 for Mac 17.4 Preview 1 is now out, with GA slated for later in the year. Cheers to all the new productivity for .NET MAUI developers.

.NET Conf Focus on MAUI

.NET Conf is the defacto event for .NET announcements every year, with each November aligning with major .NET releases. However, there is plenty of excitement in the .NET ecosystem and by community demand, .NET Conf now hosts several Focus events throughout the year—deep diving into specific .NET technology stacks each time. .NET Conf Focus on MAUI was a one day free livestream event on August 9, 2022, and it was awesome.

.NET Conf Focus on MAUI brought together folks who are most passionate about .NET MAUI, with speakers from Microsoft and developer community worldwide. The agenda touched upon just about every aspect of .NET MAUI development stack—from getting started, C# 11, Design, DevOps, Blazor/JS integration, Architecture, Code Reuse and a lot more.

Thanks to the production team, all of the .NET Conf Focus on MAUI sessions were livestreamed and now available as YouTube videos. Thanks for tuning in, developer community—we all now have a treasure trove of content to learn from.

.NET MAUI Apps on Android

Done building your .NET MAUI cross-platform app? Congrats. But the next step, while exciting, is also critically important to get right—publishing mobile apps to the respective App Stores. While the overall processes are similar, iOS/Android/Windows each have specific nuances around rules and requirements—developers need to follow all steps meticulously.

Leomaris Reyes wrote up a detailed article on publishing .NET MAUI apps to Android—this is wonderful guidance for anyone targeting apps for Google's ecosystem.

Once a .NET MAUI app is ready and tested, developers need to produce two artifacts—the Android App Package (apk) and Android App Bundle (aab). A Keystore file stores developer credentials securely and is used to sign the app packages—Leomaris talks through how to generate this file from Command Line tooling and the steps involved. Once done, developers need to update the .NET MAUI .csroj file with Keystore file references and perform a Release build—voila, all generated files are ready for upload to Google Play store.

Publishing apps is exciting and thanks Leomaris for the writeup so we developers don't miss a step.

.NET MAUI Book

Enterprise applications often have complicated architectures and design patterns can help in maintaining codebase sanity. Writing a book is one of the more difficult things to do in the software industry. And writing a book on application patterns on top of a new development platform though, sounds way too ambitious.

Michael Stonis seems to have done just that though—with an eBook on Enterprise Application Patterns with .NET MAUI.

The book helps jumpstart development for anyone new to .NET MAUI, but moves to more advanced topics. For real world .NET MAUI apps, developers could use professional guidance and some additional toolkits are recommended to ease into popular design patterns.

The eBook is completely free, will be updated often and available as a part of Microsoft .NET documentation. Big cheers to Michael for writing this up.

.NET MAUI Beautiful UI

.NET MAUI is the next generation cross-platform technology stack for reaching mobile/desktop platforms—developers can target iOS/Android/Windows/MacOS from a single .NET code base. This, however, also means a large diverse audience with differing UI/UX expectations from .NET MAUI apps and design aesthetics are called for to create beautiful apps that engage/delight users.

There is plenty of inspiration from the developer community though, and Jon Galloway announced the .NET MAUI Beautiful UI Challenge to rally all of us to do better.

Snppts is a community-run website helping aggregate beautiful UI snippets made with .NET MAUI/Xamarin.Forms—a showcase for reusable UI components. Javier Suárez has also been maintaining the .NET MAUI Good Looking UI repository—a curated list of awesome .NET MAUI samples that demonstrate how to create great looking UI.

With plenty of design inspiration, there is now an open challenge for developers—create and share beautiful app designs made with .NET MAUI. Up for grabs are awesome .NET MAUI sticker packs and claim to precious developer fame.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!