Sands of MAUI: Issue #37

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 towards 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 December 13, 2021:

.NET Podcast App

The .NET Podcast app was a cornerstone demo during .NET Conf—a unified app running on multiple platforms and showcasing the flexibility of code sharing across Blazor, .NET MAUI and ASP.NET Core. The source code for the .NET Podcast app was recently open sourced, but running it locally involved a few steps—who knew a real world app had some moving pieces and architectural dependencies.

James Montemagno produced a video showcasing local development walkthrough with the .NET Podcast app—a how-to guide on grabbing source code and running the app locally.

Aside from .NET MAUI and Blazor code, the .NET Podcast app has Azure Container Service dependencies, uses GitHub Actions and utilizes backend APIs powered by ASP.NET Core. This is a great real-world sample app perfect for developer exploration and James shows how to have the full end-to-end demo running on developer local machine.

Hot Restart

Developers have always been told that one needs a Mac to build for iOS from Xamarin.Forms/.NET MAUI while on a Windows machine. Turns out, this is not entirely true thanks to a wonderful feature—Xamarin Hot Restart, which enables developers to quickly test code changes on an iOS device during app development. Armed with an iOS device and a connecting cable, developers can directly deploy apps to the device from Xamarin.Forms with Visual Studio while running on Windows.

Gerald Versluis produced a video exploring iOS development without a Mac and dived head first into Xamarin Hot Restart. As usual, Gerald makes the technology accessible to anyone—starting with the basics of Xamarin Hot Restart, developer setup, installing iTunes and connecting to physical iOS device.

With a paid Apple Developer Program subscription, developers can set up Visual Studio on Windows to directly deploy/test apps to iOS devices—and even publish apps to the App Store.

.NET FrontEnd Day

Building client apps with .NET? You could be building web/desktop/mobile apps across a variety of platforms with some solid tooling. And nothing else celebrates .NET on the client side like .NET FrontEnd Day—a full day virtual conference, with focus on building frontend apps using .NET.

With a successful first year under the belt, .NET FrontEnd Day is gearing up for the second edition on Feb 10, 2022 and just announced their list of speakers. Rest assured, there would be no dearth of .NET MAUI and Blazor love—developers should register and tune in.

.NET Today & Tomorrow

.NET has come a long way and the future of the .NET developer ecosystem looks bright. There is, however, a lot to take in and the bigger picture story from experienced .NET developers help.

Ed Charbeneau produced a video on the .NET of Today and Tomorrow, recapping some historical perspective and looking ahead at the future with .NET 6.

Ed talks about the .NET unification story and how .NET UI tooling from Progress Telerik can help .NET developers be more successful. It did not take long for Ed to dive into modern web development with .NET 6 and Blazor and exploring the code-sharing future with Hybrid apps using Blazor on top of .NET MAUI—all backed by solid demos and code walkthroughs.

.NET 6 Favorites

.NET 6 is out and there was a lot of .NET developer content shared at .NET Conf. While most developers are still taking it all in, Dave Brock wrote up an article on favorite things in .NET 6.

Dave correctly points out some of the major objectives with .NET 6—lower barrier to entry into .NET, improving app startup/performance metrics, elevated client app development experience and faster developer inner loop.

While most of Dave's favorites lean towards modern web development, many point to the core benefits of .NET 6 for .NET MAUI developers as well. Some of the .NET 6 excitement centers around Hot Reload, C# 10 features, Minimal APIs and Blazor improvements—the present unified reality of .NET is looking pretty good.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!