Telerik blogs
SandsOfMaui-870x220

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 27, 2021:

.NET MAUI Preview 8 Review

.NET MAUI Preview 8 has been out with .NET RC1, and Gerald Versluis produced a 'Breaking News' style video covering all the updates. Since the .NET MAUI GA timeline got pushed back a little, Gerald took the time to cover what that means for Xamarin.Forms releases/support—everything gets pushed back as well and migration to .NET MAUI, when needed, should not be a big deal.

Gerald also showcased the new .NET MAUI tooling support in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4—Hot Reload and XAML Live Previewer combine well to really tighten the developer inner loop.

BreakingMauiNews

.NET MAUI Preview 8 Hands-On

James Montemagno also produced a video diving deep into the .NET MAUI Preview 8 update. James took the time to walk through every step of the installation and setting up the development environment for successfully building .NET MAUI apps.

With Preview 8, Windows (through WinUI) joins iOS, Android & Mac for a true Single Project experience within the .NET MAUI solution and MauiProgram.cs cleans up app bootstrapping. You can also see the familiar excitement about Hot Reload, both XAML and C#, now starting to work—this is a big deal, along with easier iOS device deployments.

MauiHandsOn

The Ultimate .NET MAUI Update

Matt Soucoup joined the party to make the three musketeers who produced the latest episode of the .NET MAUI podcast. Surprise, the topics covered included—.NET MAUI Preview 8 and tooling updates.

Aside from the awkwardness that everyone is ordering iPhone 13 Pros in signature blue, David provided an insider perspective on the .NET MAUI release and the Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4 installation/tooling changes. There was the usual coverage of cool Azure services/samples and looking ahead at all the hotness coming together for .NET Conf.

MauiPodcast

.NET MAUI Tooling

With .NET MAUI roadmaps items going green and Visual Studio 2022 Previews coming along, it is no surprise that more tooling is lighting up for .NET MAUI developers. David Ortinau put out a tease with some .NET MAUI features being worked on—the community stepped up the guesswork to point out the awesome. Some of the cool stuff includes Shadows, Borders, Corners, new Layouts, Live Preview and more.

MauiTooling

Xamarin.Forms Custom Controls

A common thing in professional Xamarin.Forms development is creating custom UI—an isolated component that is reusable throughout the app and even across a suite of apps for better UX consistency.

Charlin Agramonte wrote up a great post on tips and tricks when creating custom controls in Xamarin.Forms. These are real-world strategies that help with control usage, maintainability and adhere to standards of control API consumption. The pointers include using Control Templates for binding ease, implementing OnPropertyChanged pattern and most importantly—unsubscribing event handlers.

CustomControls

That's it for now.

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

Cheers, developers!


SamBasu
About the Author

Sam Basu

Sam Basu is a technologist, author, speaker, Microsoft MVP, gadget-lover and Progress Developer Advocate for Telerik products. With a long developer background, he now spends much of his time advocating modern web/mobile/cloud development platforms on Microsoft/Telerik technology stacks. His spare times call for travel, fast cars, cricket and culinary adventures with the family. You can find him on the internet.

Related Posts

Comments

Comments are disabled in preview mode.