Enhancements in .NET MAUI All-in-One Project Templates

As we all know .NET MAUI is an evolution of Xamarin.Forms. The underlying architecture transitioned from Renderers to Handlers. The project structure is unified. But for the projects that are getting migrated and developers coming from Xamarin.Forms background would feel at home with the classic multi-project solution structure.

To effectively support this, the All-in-One project templates introduced an option to abstract the Shared components as a separate .NET MAUI Class Library.

This will create a solution structure that is akin to Xamarin.Forms (the only difference is that there won’t be multiple head projects).

The CLI template adds the below boolean parameter as part of v5.5.0:

-mcl | --maui-class-library – The default value is false.

dotnet new mauiapp -o MyApp -mcl

Using the options in tandem abstracts both MAUI components and Razor components in a Hybrid-style app:

dotnet new mauiapp -o HybridApp -dp Hybrid -mcl -rcl

The .NET MAUI VS extension has also been updated to align with this modification.

Apart from this, the following are the noteworthy changes after the preceding article.

• Added Apple’s Privacy Manifest file to facilitate submitting iOS apps to the App Store
• The MauiVersion property is updated to dynamically refer to the latest available service release (8.*). Detailed article here.
• Auto inclusion of .NET MAUI Community Toolkit’s XML namespace while using .NET MAUI generic item template with its type name defined with scope as mct:
• Support for creating .NET MAUI projects on .NET 9 Previews
• An innovative generic template, in XAML and C#, for creating items of any type. To know more about this, take a look at this detailed article

If you have any issues or features to suggest, please raise an issue with appropriate details here. Ideas are most welcome.

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Much of my time is spent on adding new features to the templates pack if you want to recognize the work and sustain the momentum, kindly consider sponsoring on the GitHub Sponsor page or Buy Me a Coffee page. Thanks in advance.

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