.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.
The most requested feature from Xamarin.CommunityToolkit package, MediaElement, is now ported to the .NET MAUI CommunityToolkit following the MAUI’s very own handler-based implementation.
Due to the dependencies involved, this is released as a separate NuGet package titled CommunityToolkit.Maui.MediaElement. The NuGet package is now available to access from the public NuGet feed. The stable version supports only .NET 7 and .NET 6 backward compatibility supported in the earlier developer preview version is now out of context.
It is highly recommended to update to this latest v1.0.1 release as this aligns with the .NET MAUI’s implicit Windows AppSDK package dependency.
The most requested feature from Xamarin.CommunityToolkit package, MediaElement, is now getting ported to the .NET MAUI CommunityToolkit following the MAUI’s very own handler-based implementation.
Peter Foot and other members of the repository are hard at work to make it available by the .NET 7 GA release timeframe scheduled early next month during the .NET Conf 2022.
This package is now released as a stable release in Jan 2023, and details have been covered in a separate article here.
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.
Developer Thoughts 