This blog provides show notes for our November 11, 2021 webinar, “Create Your First .NET MAUI App.” The webinar was presented by Microsoft MVP Codrina Merigo. If you missed the webinar or would like to watch it again, please see our YouTube channel or watch it here.
The Q&A segment of the webinar is provided at the end of this blog post.
Overview
During this webinar, we’ll take a look at the latest cross-platform framework, .NET MAUI. We’ll walk through installing, setting up, and creating your first .NET MAUI application.
.NET: Your platform for building anything
.NET is a free, cross-platform, open-source developer platform. It is used in development for desktop, web, cloud, mobile, gaming, IoT, AI, and more.
.NET MAUI is the most productive way to develop native apps that perform great on Android, iOS, MacOS, or Windows, all from a single codebase.
.NET Multi-platform App UI
- Cross-platform, native UI.
- Single project system, single codebase.
- Deploy to mobile and desktop devices.
- General availability in Q2 2022.
Supported platforms
- Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher.
- iOS 10 or higher.
- macOS 10.13 or higher (using Mac Catalyst).
- Windows desktop and UWP, using WinUI 3.
- Tizen, supported by Samsung.
- Linux, supported by the community.
Overview
- 50+ pages, layouts, and controls built from C# or XAML.
- Two-way data binding.
- Navigation with shell.
- Visual state manager.
- Animation and drawing APIs.
- Thousands of control customizations.
Native performance
- .NET for iOS does full ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to produce an ARM binary for Apple’s App Store.
- .NET for Android takes advantage of just-in-time (JIT) compilation on Android devices.
Hot reload for .NET MAUI
- No code changes are needed.
- Interact with your real data on emulators, simulators, and devices.
- Intelligent and resilient.
- Works with custom controls, third-party libraries, and more!
.NET MAUI hot restart
- Fast rebuild and redeploy your application.
- Debug on your iPhone directly from your PC.
- Works great with hot reload!
Prerequisites
To create .NET MAUI apps, you need Visual Studio 17.1 Preview 1 and .NET 6 installed.
Q&A
Will Xamarin.Forms be discontinued in the near future?
After the release of .NET MAUI, there will still be support for Xamarin for some time. Please check https://github.com/dotnet/maui.
Can you give us some links to help install .NET MAUI on PC?
Announcing .NET MAUI Preview 10
Does .NET MAUI support WPF?
Yes.
Can I continue using MVVM with MAUI?
Yes.
How is “Dependency” implemented in MAUI to manage specificities in each platform?
Check on https://github.com/dotnet/maui. You can also take a look at the community toolkit.
How much change is there regarding the code with Xamarin vs. MAUI?
On the code side, you can check the progress on https://github.com/dotnet/maui.
Just added the MAUI template and when I created a solution, I get a series of errors that the target platform is not recognized. How could I fix this?
I would suggest trying a fresh install.
Do you know of an ETA for MAUI going gold?
It is best to check on GitHub.
Are you able to use a Blazor hybrid approach with MAUI?
Yes.
When will Syncfusion complete the porting of the existing 155+ Xamarin UI controls over to MAUI?
We are initially working on delivering the most popular and important controls from Xamarin.Forms. We expect to complete the migration of all important controls by 2022 Volume 3 (September). You can expect a lot of new controls in each release.
Will your MAUI UI controls support the four platform targets of Android, iOS, Mac Catalyst, and Windows?
Yes.
Will there be hot reload support in Syncfusion MAUI controls?
You can expect a seamless experience with our controls in hot reload.
The sample Visual Studio MAUI app is quite basic. Will Syncfusion be showcasing their MAUI components in a sample?
Yes, we are updating our samples in the following GitHub repo: https://github.com/syncfusion/maui-demos.
We are still working to include several new samples and controls.
We will be adding showcase apps as well in the future.
Will your controls work in a MAUI Blazor app?
Our .NET MAUI controls will work in .NET MAUI Blazor apps.
The native controls that Syncfusion develops for .NET MAUI, will they use the graphical API (MAUI.Graphics) or the native controls of the platform?
Most of our controls will be using MAUI graphics APIs.
