Beginner series
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.
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.
First things first, .NET 6 RC1 and .NET MAUI Preview 8 got released this week but the big breaking news is that .NET MAUI will be ready for Production use (General Availability) only by early Q2 of 2022 (next year) and NOT as originally planned with .NET 6 GA by Nov 2021.
This is definitely sad news for all those Xamarin/.NET MAUI developers who wanted to leverage this brand-new architecture. Hopefully by that time, if additional targets such as Linux/Wasm gets onboard, it would be worth waiting.
With .NET 6 Preview 6 released on Jul 14, 2021, and now Preview 7 released on Aug 10, 2021, .NET MAUI progressed a lot with Workloads, Gestures, Clipping, Alerts, New Layouts, and mainly first-class support for Visual Studio 2022 (with Preview 3.x). But, there is a catch in here. NO item templates for Visual Studio for now :-(.
Update: This extension is now updated to support .NET MAUI Preview 10 with VS2022 Preview (17.1.0 Preview 1.0) IDE and .NET MAUI (Preview) Mobile Development workload installed. This can be downloaded and installed from the same link mentioned in this article.
Update: A more advanced all-in-one .NET MAUI App project template is now available to install. Check out this article for more details.
You might wonder whether you’ve read the title of this post correctly, yes, of course, .NET MAUI project template is now available from the .NET CLI toolset and VS IDE.
Both VS2019 and VS2022 for Windows are now provisioned with project templates for both Maui as well as Maui Blazor app models. Use VS2019 16.11 Preview 4.0 or VS2022 Preview 3.0 or later version to build the project.
And, users on macOS can continue to use VS Code for time being as Microsoft is doing a complete revamp of Visual Studio for Mac. Develop MAUI app in VS Code with Comet for .NET Mobile extension. For further details, read this article.
Update: A far more advanced all-in-one .NET MAUI App project template is now available to install. Check out this article for more details.
Have published a VS extension to install the item templates that target .NET MAUI Preview. To know more about it, take a look at this .NET MAUI – Templates for Visual Studio article.
Developer Thoughts 