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 toward 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 April 26, 2021:
Aside from .NET MAUI, turns out the ASP.NET teams also got busy using the latest .NET 6 Preview 3 bits, and Daniel Roth detailed all the ASP.NET Core updates. With .NET 6, Blazor is poised to power cross-platform hybrid mobile/desktop solutions, all powered by .NET MAUI under the covers. These Blazor Hybrid apps effortlessly combine native UI with .NET MAUI and web UI rendered inside modern WebViews like WebView2 or WKWebView.
The same BlazorWebView can now also power WPF and Windows Forms apps—this is a great way to modernize .NET desktop investments with .NET MAUI and bring in latest Blazor innovations.
Gerald Versluis sat down with Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin for a .NET Rocks episode to talk all things .NET MAUI. Gerald talked about setting developer expectations, investing in Xamarin.Forms today and migrating to .NET MAUI.
With .NET 6 Preview 3, .NET MAUI leveraged WinUI 3 as a platform to reach the Windows desktop. Hot off the heels of that preview, David Ortinau and Maddy Leger joined the April WinUI Community Standup Call to talk about .NET MAUI updates—borderline too-close-for-comfort Teams group mode included.
David Ortinau also had an extended Q/A with Almir Vuk from InfoQ on .NET MAUI. Key conversational topics included support for Xamarin.Essentials, Blazor Hybrid apps, upgrade assistance and the path forward with .NET MAUI.
Dmitry Lyalin and Tim Miller joined James Montemagno on the Xamarin Show to show off the latest and greatest with XAML Hot Reload. With Live Visual Tree and Changes Only mode, UI diff'ing and re-rendering are super optimized. This adds a lot to developer productivity with Xamarin.Forms/XAML technologies today and .NET MAUI tomorrow.
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.