MSBuild 2023 – Focus on .NET MAUI and Blazor Hybrid

ChatGPT and Copilot were the primary focus of this year’s MSBuild 2023, Microsoft’s annual developer conference.

From the .NET MAUI perspective, with just around 1 year of official support left for Xamarin, which will end on May 1, 2024, the main focus was on the upgrade from Xamarin to .NET MAUI.

Two options are available for now. For Windows users, a Visual Studio extension and a CLI option, whereas for macOS users, only the CLI option the former is not yet made available for macOS users.

CLI tool can be installed with the below command:

dotnet tool install --global upgrade-assistant

If already installed, can be upgraded via:

dotnet tool update --global upgrade-assistant

The executable is named as upgrade-assistant. Run this and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process.

Once the VS extension is installed, restart the VS instance, open the Xamarin project, in the Solution Explorer, right-click the Project you wish to migrate, and select the Upgrade option to continue the process. More details are in this blog post.

The following are the on-demand sessions now uploaded to the Microsoft Developers channel on YouTube.

David and Maddy’s session of All things client and mobile app development with .NET MAUI (BRK204)

Maddy Montaquila showed a demo of using upgrade assistant VS extension Upgrading from Xamarin to .NET MAUI (OD119).

Then for the Hybrid scenario, Blazor + .NET MAUI – The Perfect Hybrid (ODFP211).

David Ortinau showed how to use Angular and ReactJS for Mobile and Desktop Apps (OD118) using HybridWebView (now available as a preview).

If you’re a Blazor developer, this is a nice intro to Full stack web in .NET 8 with Blazor (OD116) by Dan Roth.

Happy coding. Stay connected as we continue to learn and share the experiences from this exciting journey of being a .NET developer.