.NET MAUI Community Tookit Update Adds TouchBehavior -- Visual Studio Magazine

.NET MAUI Community Tookit Update Adds TouchBehavior

By David Ramel
05/06/2024

A new feature in the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit allows developers to interact with any visual element in an app based on touch, mouse clicks and hover events.

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit provides reusable components for building applications with .NET MAUI, the successor of Xamarin.Forms. By providing ready-made animations, behaviors, converters, effects and helpers, the toolkit simplifies typical development tasks for iOS, Android, macOS and WinUI applications.

TouchBehavior replaces the TouchEffect functionality found in Xamarin.Forms.

"The TouchBehavior implementation makes it possible to customize many different visual properties of the VisualElement that it is attached to such as the background color, opacity, rotation, and scale, as well as many other properties," the dev team said in a recent announcement of version 8. "Additionally, TouchBehavior makes it possible to implement long press touch gestures and enables you to invoke code whenever your user long presses any visual element in your app."

Along with that new feature, the team described a breaking change for the Snackbar on Windows and a new feature for Android navigation bar color.

Regarding the latter, the team said, "You can now color this bar on Android so that your app will feel even more immersive, and your theme is completely integrated with everything you see on screen."

The team also explained that this Android feature does not refer to what many people commonly think of as a navigation bar that typically appears at the top of a page, sporting the page title and possibly some toolbar items. Rather, it's the system navigation bar with the three buttons for going back a page, opening the multi-tasking view and going to the home screen on an Android device.

Going forward, the team is working on porting the CameraView over from Xamarin, to be released as a separate package.

"Furthermore we're working on improvements for MediaElement to bring deeper integration with the operating system like playing media from the lock screen and showing relevant metadata, and of course much more beyond that," the team said.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'

The brand-new Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 lets devs specify the AI model they want to use with the baked-in GitHub Copilot, but some are clamoring for more options, such as the latest/greatest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic that is available in VS Code.
SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric in Preview for Faster AI Apps

Microsoft's early embrace of advanced AI in its dev tooling continues apace with the new public preview of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, the company's analytics/data platform.
Microsoft Seeks to Sort & Simplify its Agentic AI Dev Story

The company will infuse multi-agent runtime tech developed in its AutoGen research project into its production-ready Semantic Kernel SDK, both open source.
Uno Platform Unveils 'Hot Design' Tool for Cross-Platform .NET Apps

Uno Platform provided a new take on visual designers for .NET app development, claiming a breakthrough that changes code at runtime rather than the design stage.
Simple k-NN Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of k-nearest neighbors regression to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, k-NN regression is often slightly less accurate, but is very simple to implement and customize, and the results are highly interpretable.