Sands of MAUI: Issue #63

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 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 June 27, 2022:

.NET Conf Focus on MAUI

.NET Conf events have become the de-facto place for .NET announcements/releases and for developers to soak in the latest in .NET knowledge. Started over a decade back, .NET Conf features free continuous livestreams with folks working on or most passionate about .NET. The main .NET Conf conference happens each year in November to align with .NET release cadence—with .NET 7 scheduled to launch in Nov 2022.

While the main .NET Conf focuses on bigger .NET, several Focus events throughout the year take a deep dive into various .NET technology stacks.

Say hello to .NET Conf Focus on MAUI—the next .NET Conf event to dive into all things .NET MAUI. Scheduled for August 9th 2022, .NET Conf Focus on MAUI will be a free all-day livestream event that features speakers from Microsoft and developer community—expect all out love for .NET Multi-platform App UI.

Developers can expect to hear the latest in .NET MAUI towards building native apps/libraries/components across iOS/Android/Windows/MacOS and sharing code with web apps. All in with .NET MAUI technologies, latest news, familiar faces and awesome developer stories—expect a ton of fun at .NET Conf Focus on MAUI. Save the date people and come join.

Layouts in .NET MAUI

As more and more developers start building production apps with .NET MAUI, there are some foundational concepts everyone will need to understand to be successful. Most mobile/desktop apps are usually a collection of pages/views with navigation in between—and developers/designers decide how content is to be rendered within each page.

Thankfully, there are well established patterns that keep content organized in visual tree—Layouts are here to help and Leomaris Reyes wrote up a great article exploring Layout options in .NET MAUI.

Coming over from Xamarin.Forms, Layouts in .NET MAUI are meant to provide structure to how controls/content is rendered inside a visual container and provide flexible UI across various form factors. Leomaris dives into the four major Layout classes in .NET MAUI—StackLayout, AbsoluteLayout, Grid and FlexLayout.

StackLayouts are all about how content is oriented—horizontal/vertical, while AbsoluteLayout is all about positioning elements using explicit values or values relative to the size of the layout. The ubiquitous Grid helps developers organize UI elements through rows and columns, which can be proportional or absolute size. And lastly, the FlexLayout is similar to StackLayout in laying down controls horizontally/vertically, but with the added advantage of wrapping its children UI in case of overflow. Layouts in .NET MAUI is a fundamental knowledge skill that most developers would need to master—cheers to Leomaris for such a detailed writeup.

Using Shell in .NET MAUI

.NET MAUI has now adopted the Shell in default project templates, meant to reduce app complexity by providing fundamental features that most apps require ready out of the box—like a layout/visual hierarchy of content, a URI-based navigation scheme and an integrated search handler. The Shell is not something .NET MAUI developers are forced to use; rather, it's an optional sidekick that can immediately get apps off to a great starting point. The Shell may, however, be new to .NET MAUI developers and Daniel Hindrikes is here to help with a wonderful introduction to Shell.

Daniel starts out with the basics—how developers can get going on a fresh .NET MAUI app with Shell. It's easy to choose a standard layout/navigation mechanism in Shell—Flyouts or Tabs, both built into the default Shell with easy ways to plug in content.

Daniel keeps it real with hooking up Tabs/Flyouts within the Shell and showing off the resulting .NET MAUI app immediately—developers getting started should find this a helpful introduction on how to use the Shell within .NET MAUI apps.

WSA with .NET MAUI

Windows Subsystem for Android™️ (WSA) enables Windows 11 devices to run Android applications that are available in the Amazon Appstore. For developers building Android apps, Amazon AppStore and Google Play represent significant opportunities—and .NET MAUI can be the perfect technology stack to build a true native cross-platform app. For folks targeting Android with .NET MAUI, the WSA has a huge potential to aid in developer workflow—test Android apps right inside of Windows.

Lance McCarthy wrote up a post on how to use the WSA for .NET MAUI apps—build/deploy/debug Android projects from Visual Studio 2022 17.3 onwards to WSA running on a Windows machine.

Lance starts out with a step-by-step guide to make WSA appear in the list of target Android devices in Visual Studio—this is a major time saver for folks building for Android with .NET MAUI. Developers need to have the Amazon App Store app installed, configured for Developer mode and Android Debug Bridge (ADB) Command Prompt connecting ADB to WSA. Once configured, a .NET MAUI project simply needs to target Android—and voila, the WSA shows up in the list of local Android Devices as a target device.

The WSA promises to significantly speed up developer inner loop when building Android apps with .NET MAUI—no longer is there a need to wait on slower Android simulators. Lance also ends the post with a set of quick troubleshooting guides when using the WSA—the WSA is pretty awesome and should be a must-have tool for .NET MAUI developers targeting Android.

.NET MAUI @ DevReach

DevReach is the premier developer conference in central and eastern Europe, started over a decade back in Sofia BG. As the world slowly comes out of the global pandemic, developers have two big reasons to rejoice—DevReach is back in person with hybrid mode for 2022 and coming to the US for the first time!

To be hosted as a part of Progress 360, DevReach will happen September 11-14 on Boston waterfront and pack a punch—40+ technical sessions, workshops and keynotes. Developers can expect renowned industry experts and influencers sharing their passions/insights about the latest app dev technologies and best practices.

What's in DevReach for .NET MAUI developers? Well, a ton—how about familiar faces like David Ortinau, Maddy Montaquila, Luce Carter, Rachel Kang, Sweekriti Satpathy, Alyssa Nicoll and yours truly.

Need to get your feet wet and dive into .NET MAUI headfirst? Come join Maddy for an all day hands-on .NET MAUI workshop. Developers will be treated to regular sessions diving into the latest with .NET MAUI—from basics to Blazor Hybrid, Migration paths from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI, Accessibility and Modernization strategies.

All this in addition to lots of other sessions around .NET, latest web and native app development trends, language features and developer wellness—DevReach will be loads of fun. We hope you'll join us.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!