Sands of MAUI: Issue #24

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 September 13, 2021:

.NET MAUI Development on MacOS

.NET MAUI is a big promise, and modern cross-platform tooling has lots of dependencies from various teams—VS engineering, XAML experience, MAUI folks and, of course, bits from Apple and Google. There is much to celebrate on Windows-land with Visual Studio 2022 Previews that light up .NET MAUI tooling. But VS for Mac is going through a huge UI update and .NET MAUI tinkering on macOS is mostly powered through CLI tooling, with a bit of VS Code debugging.

If you are living on the bleeding edge with .NET MAUI development on MacOS and hitting a few roadblocks, don't lose heart—you're rarely alone. A struggling developer wrote up a list of potential hiccups, and corresponding triumphs as you work around them—.NET MAUI development is very welcome on MacOS and tooling will only get better.

App Center for Xamarin.Forms

With mobile app lifecycles, the real work often begins after shipping the app to Stores—continued monitoring of app health and providing value to users through updates. If your app has crashes, you want to know and potentially do something about them before bad reviews come in.

Thankfully, VS App Center Diagnostics are a great way to automate crash reporting and collect precious stack traces. Gerald Versluis produced a helpful video on App Center Diagnostics—covering everything from introduction, setup using NuGet, hooking up to custom errors and inspecting reports on App Center. Developers do not need to stay in the dark as to how their app is doing out in the wild—App Center provides all the desired visibility.

AndroidSDK Tools

The awesome Jonathan Dick had written yet another OSS developer tool a while back—it just got resurrected for modern mobile development with .NET MAUI. Welcome to Android SDK Tools—available as a NuGet package and also a global .NET CLI tool. The tool is helpful for managing Android SDK installs, creating/managing Android Virtual Devices (AVDs), execute Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands and start/deploy to Android Emulators. This is gold for .NET MAUI developers targeting Android, particularly for automation in a CI/CD pipelines.

XamExpert Day

Some passionate Xamarin folks in EU had started the XamExpertDay—an all-day conference focusing on all things awesome in the Xamarin technology stack. XamExpertDay is back this year—appreciating the present with Xamarin, and looking ahead at the future with .NET MAUI. The speaker list includes all the usual troublemakers in the space and the event is entirely online with two parallel tracks. So come join the fun with XamExpertDay on Oct 1st this year—before the potential evolution of the event to .NET MAUI Expert Day in the future.

Scroll Reveal in Xamarin.Forms

A common UX paradigm on mobile apps is to scroll through a list and be able to see the item/detail underneath—this is actually a little tricky to implement. Trust seasoned Xamarin developer Charlin Agramonte to come up with an elegant solution for scroll reveal experience. Charlin starts out explaining the requirements and building up the solution one pillar at a time—full/empty container, appropriate DataTemplates, ViewModel and the lazy loading implementation.

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!