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.
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.
Resource management is one of the key aspects of app development, be it mobile or desktop. The developer has to deal with a variety of resources ranging from images, fonts, splash screen, styles, and raw assets like HTML, PDF, or could be even simple text files.
That too when it comes to cross-platform development, each platform has its own way of managing resources and it’s a daunting task for the development team to know and manage all those things. For example, image requirements in multiple sizes to support devices with various resolutions for a rich experience. Fortunately, icon fonts solve a part of this problem by auto-scaling. But still, font is managed differently in each of the platforms.
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.
In the earlier post, we’ve seen about the SDK-style project file details, but it is also vital to look at the unified project structure to get into the application flow for each platform.
In this Single project structure, both platform-specific and platform-independent code will live in the same space.
Developer Thoughts 