Mobile Blazor Bindings Unifies Cross-Platform UI -- Visual Studio Magazine

Mobile Blazor Bindings Unifies Cross-Platform UI

By David Ramel
10/30/2020

Microsoft shipped a new preview of its experimental project, Mobile Blazor Bindings, with a UI unification across the web and mobile/desktop spaces.

Experimental Mobile Blazor Bindings help developers use C# and .NET to build native and hybrid mobile apps, targeting Android, iOS, Windows and macOS. Developers can use Razor syntax to define UI components and behaviors of an application with underlying UI components based on Xamarin.Forms native UI components, while they are mixed with HTML elements in hybrid apps.

In the new Preview 5, more UI sharing is enabled.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Mixing and Matching Native and Web UI *(source: Microsoft).*

"You can now use a Razor Class Library (RCL) to build your UI and app logic once and use it in a Blazor Web app and in a Mobile Blazor Bindings app," said Microsoft's Eilon Lipton in an Oct. 30 blog post.

"You can build one UI using Blazor Web and host it in a Blazor Server or Blazor Web Assembly app and also in a Mobile Blazor Bindings hybrid app to target Android, iOS, macOS and Windows."

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Reusable UI *(source: Microsoft).*

Support for Razor Class Libraries(RCLs) -- reusable packages of app UI and logic -- is generally improved in Preview 5. "You can use the same library in a Blazor Hybrid application as part of a mobile or desktop app," Lipton said. "The web content is hosted in a Web View, just like any hybrid app content, and it can interact with any native parts of the application, and the reverse is true as well. Previous versions included limited support for RCLs, and this version adds improved support for them, particularly support for serving static assets such as CSS and images, as well as support for JSInterop for interop between JavaScript and .NET code."

In other updates, the Shell control from Xamarin.Forms can be used for navigation, and developers can directly use SkiaSharp's Canvas APIs to render rich high-performance graphics directly in an app.

More information is provided in the release notes.

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.