Sands of MAUI: Issue #30

Welcome to the Sands of MAUI—newsletter-style issues dedicated to bringing together the 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 October 25, 2021:

.NET MAUI Preview 9 Overview

The latest .NET MAUI Preview bits are out and how can one not expect the obvious—Gerald Versluis with a wonderful .NET MAUI Preview 9 overview video. Gerald walked us through the lay of the land as of the latest release—updated UI controls ported over from Xamarin.Forms and the newest UX hotness with Borders, Corners and Shadows.

Next on the agenda was the optimization of Android startup times and covering news of community UI component suites aimed at developer productivity. And why only talk about things when developers want to see the latest .NET MAUI bits in action? Like always, Gerald does not disappoint.

.NET Conf

Modern .NET is the developer platform for building anything for anywhere and nothing celebrates .NET quite like .NET Conf. More than a decade old now, .NET Conf is a fully virtual conference happening November 9-11, 2021—streamed live non-stop for three days.

.NET Conf this year will see the launch of .NET 6 with LTS support and developer tooling supporting the new release. While Microsoft folks will cover the big news, there are lots of awesome community speakers lined up to carry forward the excitement. .NET Conf conference agenda is out with all session/speaker details—go ogle!

.NET MAUI Community Toolkit

Work is ongoing for the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—a set of libraries meant to augment the .NET MAUI developer experience. Brandon Minnick wrote up a detailed post on how developers can get started using the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit—with detailed steps and sample apps. The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is available as two NuGet packages—CommunityToolkit.Maui and CommunityToolkit.Maui.Markup, both easy to add to .NET MAUI apps running on .NET 6.

For those new to the XAML ecosystem, the explanations on use of Converters and Behaviors is golden, or folks may want to roll with Fluent C# Extension Methods to define visual markup without XAML—the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is here to help.

ASP.NET Core Updates in .NET 6 RC2

The latest .NET 6 RC2 update is out with “go live” production-readiness and empowers two hot client technologies—.NET MAUI and ASP.NET Core. The web stack is relevant to .NET MAUI developers for two reasons—Blazor that can be used toward Desktop apps and Minimal API updates that can power backend services.

Daniel Roth covered all the ASP.NET Core updates, notably Native dependency support for Blazor WebAssembly apps and Minimal APIs. Blazor client-side Wasm apps can now utilize native dependencies that have been built to run on WebAssembly—examples included tapping into native C code and the use of the shiny SkiaSharp library to paint pixels on a canvas within a Blazor WASM app.

Minimal APIs running on .NET 6 gain a bunch of new features—Parameter Binding with TryParse and BindAsync for inherited methods, ContentType of application/json for OpenAPI support and Source Code Analysis for misconfiguration issues within middleware.

macOS Monterey

At a recent Apple Unleashed event, Apple announced new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips that will power the shiny new MacBook Pro laptops. Along with new hardware comes the new macOS software update—nicknamed macOS Monterey, available for download beginning October 25, 2021. macOS Monterey comes with notable updates to FaceTime, Safari, SharePlay and other performance improvements.

The reason why this macOS update is particularly relevant for .NET MAUI developers is because of formal support for Mac Catalyst coming in Monterey. Mac Catalyst is the formal Apple-approved way of making iPad apps run on the macOS desktop, while sharing code and offering developers deep integrations into macOS through APIs. Mac Catalyst is fully baked into macOS Monterey and is the same bridge .NET MAUI uses to bring .NET apps to the macOS desktop.

That’s it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!