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.
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.
First things first, wishing you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous new year 2023.
As a recap, 2022 has been the most happening year for .NET MAUI:
November will be the most exciting month for all the .NET developers around the world as new versions of .NET get released during its annual conference, .NET Conf. Quite like the previous years, this time also, it will be hosted virtually and can be joined online. .NET 7 is slated to release at this year’s conference scheduled as a three-day event starting Tue, Nov 8, 2022, through Thu, Nov 10, 2022.
Now updated with YouTube links to replay the recorded sessions.
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.
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).
Much to the user’s delight, Microsoft released the stable version of .NET MAUI (General Availablity) a day before the start of its annual developer conference event, MSBuild.
The templates are out of the preview band with version # 6.0.312 and the package is now available to install from the NuGet.
Developer Thoughts 