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.
.NET MAUI and Blazor – Best of both modern technologies for Mobile, Desktop, and Web solutions from a single codebase.
But app development is of two categories: Existing ones and Greenfield development. New features can be part of the latter quite easily as they’re done from scratch but definitely not that easy on the former as existing investments needs to be protected. And changes can be quite expensive as it needs to be thoroughly validated before rolling out to production use.
Providing a hybrid solution is uber cool as it paves way for the reuse of components across the Web, Mobile, and Desktop solutions.
But the Mobile world has matured a lot with native features such as Deep linking, App links, etc … So it’s necessary for the Apps developed in the Hybrid model to support these to stay up to date.
Whenever a link is clicked that is shared via social media or received through messaging apps, it’s expected to open in the associated app, if installed to provide the best possible user experience.
This is the fourth article in the .NET MAUI – Blazor series and have provided links for the other 3 articles previously published.
This article primarily focuses on the Blazor Hybrid scenarios.
The reason is the potential of Blazor, the modern web UI stack based on Razor SDK and allows to work with C# language constructs which can be used across multiple frameworks with the introduction of BlazorWebView, now officially supported on .NET MAUI, classic Windows desktop application frameworks such as Windows Forms (WinForms) and WPF.
This is a follow-up article describing the new features added to the latest release that supports .NET MAUI RC1. For installation and options available in this template, a detailed article is linked here.
This release is now loaded with 4 new features:
Yesterday, Apr 12, 2022, the first Release Candidate (RC) version of .NET MAUI got released with the freeze in API design surface before General Availability (GA) in May later this year. After multiple preview releases in the past 13 months, in fact, it all started with .NET 6 Preview 2 on Mar 11, 2021, and now reached the RC stage where it can be deployed to Production and backed by an official go-live support policy.
Visual Studio 17.2.0 Preview 3.0 was also released with an updated Mobile Workload to support the same.
Yes, you read the title right. One single template to rule the possible design pattern options. To celebrate the 20th Birthday of .NET in style, happy to announce the release of a unified .NET MAUI App project template (with short name mauiapp) published as both VS extension & CLI template package so as to benefit the users on both Windows and macOS. And this is also accessible from within Visual Studio IDE.
This is Part 2 in the multi-part series of .NET MAUI – Blazor articles.
In Part 1, we’ve seen an introduction on how to make use of BlazorWebView in the .NET MAUI app.
Part 3 of this series is on the streamlined process of registering the dependencies for BlazorWebView from .NET MAUI RC1 release.
Since it is implemented as a View, it’s possible to share data between .NET MAUI and Blazor and that’s the takeaway of this article. Along with that, the core logic is now abstracted as Razor Class Library (RCL), Dependency Injection, and Component routing for Navigation.
This is Part 1 in the multi-part series of .NET MAUI – Blazor articles.
Part 2 on abstracting core logic as Razor Class Library (RCL), Component Navigation, and Sharing AppState between .NET MAUI and Blazor is now published. Click here to read the article.
Part 3 of this series on the streamlined process of registering the dependencies for BlazorWebView from .NET MAUI RC1 release is now published. Click here to read the article.
.NET MAUI, Multi-platform App UI, a framework to develop high-performant, cross-platform, native mobile and desktop applications for Android, iOS, macOS (via Mac Catalyst), and Windows from a single codebase.
And Blazor, a framework for full-stack web development with C# and Razor.
When these two modern technologies come together, then it’s certainly a delight for the .NET developers as it paves the way to leverage the skills they’re already familiar with.
Developer Thoughts 