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The Future of Xamarin.Forms: .NET MAUI

Juan Sturla

There is a little voice that is growing louder and it’s saying: “.NET MAUI”. We may have heard of it, but what is this? What does it mean?

Previously, we talked about Xamarin.Forms 5, but there is a new open-source framework on the way: .NET MAUI. It stands for .NET Multi-platform App UI and it is coming to step up and replace Xamarin.Forms. 

So, what will .NET MAUI bring us?

  • Multi-platform: One project to code them all
With MAUI you can write the functionality of your application in C#, design your UI using XAML and then compile it to run on iOS, Android, macOS and Windows! You might have to write some specific code for each platform to unlock the full potential of all of the API that is available on the device, but you can write that in C# as well (you don’t have to worry about learning Swift or Kotlin). With MAUI.Essentials, you can have access to some platform features, like the Accelerometer, Geolocation, Vibrationand more, all from the shared codebase! No native implementation required: MAUI.Essentials has got you covered.
 

 

.NET MAUI comes with a long waited feature: Hot reload. This means that you can modify how your application looks or behaves, and see the changes immediately. Forget about rebuilding! This will allow developers to build applications faster and save a lot of time from being wasted on waiting between debug sessions.
 
  • Handlers
This is a new concept introduced with .NET MAUI. Handlers are attached to UI Controls: developers can create a single, basic Handler and use it with different types of Controls or they can create more specific ones with complex functionality. The goal of the handlers is to increase the application performance, make the code more clean and easier to understand.

There are a lot of videos about this new feature! Learn more about Handlers on Microsoft Documentation or Customizing Controls with Handlers in .NET MAUI
 

When can we start using .NET MAUI?

On August 10 2021, .NET MAUI Preview 7 was introduced. It is currently available if you want to learn more and experiment with it. There are still lots of changes to be made, so you can also choose to wait for the first stable version. The first release of this brand new framework is expected to be released in November 2021.
 
What are the differences with Xamarin.Forms? Is Xamarin.Forms 5 worth it or is it better to wait for .NET MAUI to be released? What will happen to Xamarin.Forms? 
We will talk more about this on the upcoming posts