Announcing DevExpress Mobile UI for .NET MAUI Preview 11

We are pleased to announce the newest preview release of our mobile controls for .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI). In this post, I’ll summarize what’s inside this release and describe the enhancements we’ve introduced to our .NET MAUI component line. 

We released NuGet packages compatible with .NET MAUI Preview 11 on December 28th for upgrade via the command line, because the latest IDE preview was not yet released by Microsoft at that time. Yesterday, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2 and officially announced .NET MAUI Preview 11 - please take special note of the following from the announcement:

Before installing Visual Studio 2022 Preview, we highly recommend starting from a clean slate by uninstalling all .NET 6 previews and Visual Studio 2022 previews. Now, install Visual Studio 2022 Preview (17.1 Preview 2) and confirm .NET MAUI (preview) is checked under the “Mobile Development with .NET workload”. If you already have 17.1 installed, then you can just perform an update from the Visual Studio installer.

Simplified .NET MAUI Handler Registration

The .NET MAUI platform requires the registration of handlers for each control used in an application. In some projects, you may be forced to configure dozens of handlers.

To help address this limitation, we've simplified the techniques used to set up handlers for our controls. With this update, you only need to call a single method — UseDevExpress. Once called, UseDevExpress will configure all DevExpress MAUI controls simultaneously.

.NET MAUI Chips

Chips were recently introduced in our Xamarin Forms product suite and are now available for .NET MAUI. These small but highly functional visuals allow users to make selections, filter content, input tokens, or trigger actions. The following chip types are supported:

• Action Chips are like compact buttons and allow users to invoke an action related to primary content. For example, action chips may be used to display documents attached to emails.
• Filter Chips allow users to select multiple options from a set. You can use filter chips to replace toggle buttons/checkboxes or use filter chips to display filters applied to content.
• Choice Chips allow users to select a single option from a set. These chips are best used when only one choice is possible. Choice chips can be a good alternative to radio buttons and combo boxes.
• Input Chips display user input as a single piece of information (may be validated, deleted, or modified). Input chips can be used to enter entities like places, activities, roles, tags, or email addresses.

To see Chips in action, please explore the following .NET MAUI demo app:  Chips (this app uses chips to change the size and color of a T-shirt for a UI superhero).

.NET MAUI Data Form

This preview release also includes our new MAUI Data Form — a control that allows you to display and edit business objects (from registration forms and employee profiles to shipping address information and everything in between). The DevExpress MAUI Data Form control automatically generates editors for each field within the business object and displays fields one below the other on screen.

Our Data Form demo app on GitHub creates a simple Data From based on a sample business object.

Edit Form within our .NET MAUI Data Grid

One of the first controls we released for .NET MAUI was the DevExpress Data Grid. From its first release, our Data Grid allowed users to edit data values within individual grid cells. While this is a highly popular option, it is inefficient for tables with a large number of columns. If your MAUI app displays a table with many columns, or if you prefer not to allow in-cell data editing, you can now modify record values within our MAUI Edit Form. As you can see in the following image, our MAUI Edit Form displays all fields for a given record on a separate screen.

.NET MAUI Navigation Controls – Now Available in iOS

Good news – our collection of .NET MAUI navigation controls —  TabView, TabPage, DrawerView, and DrawerPage — are now available for both iOS and Android. We have updated our Tab View, Tab Page, Drawer Page, and Drawer View demo applications on GitHub. Feel free to run these apps on your favorite iOS device. 

Your Feedback Matters

As always, we welcome your thoughts. To share feedback, tell us about your long-term .NET MAUI development plans, or discuss your .NET MAUI-related needs, please email support@devexpress.com or submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center.

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