We already knew that .NET 5 is going to be released later this year, but Microsoft surprised us yesterday with the announcement of .NET 6, which is planned for November 2021. Even though that date is still far from today, we know that it will there are big plans for Xamarin: both Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin will finally become first-class citizens in the .NET world, under the acronym MAUI, which stands for .NET Multi- platform App UI.
MAUI will introduce a new approach for developing apps in Visual Studio: by default, there will be a single project that will use multi-targeting to offer 100% customization. It will have support for MVVM, MVU and Blazor! MacOS and WPF will be officially supported (and Linux is also in the roadmap).
But the changes don’t stop there: the Xamarin team is currently considering architectural changes in the Xamarin.Forms framework that will make the codebase simpler and offer better performance. Moreover, Xamarin.Essentials will be part of the .NET APIs.
What will happen then to Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android? Both will be embedded into the .NET APIs as well and they will become .NET for iOS and .NET for Android.
We cannot wait for MAUI to be released as we continue to embrace Xamarin. Want to read more about MAUI? This blogpost from Microsoft will provide you all the ins and outs!