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.
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.
Very happy to announce the availability of the Shared Class Library project template, a library that targets both Xamarin.Forms and .NET MAUI from one single project.
We all know that .NET MAUI is an evolution of Xamarin.Forms targeting .NET 6 (as of this writing), a cross-platform UI stack (native UI) targeting the Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows platforms to complement the .NET toolchain (SDK & Workloads), and a single base class library (BCL).
In the previous article, we’ve seen how to install/update the prerequisites that are necessary to work with .NET MAUI Preview 8 application.
In this article, we’re going to see the changes that got newly introduced as part of this preview and what’s changed from the earlier ones.
The most important thing is now WinUI artifacts, targeting the Windows platform, are now part of the Single project, the original design goal of .NET MAUI. Yes, one single project for all 4 presently supported target platforms. WinUI works on top of WindowsAppSDK, rebranded from Project Reunion, 1.0 (experimental) version.
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.
Developer Thoughts 