What's New in .NET MAUI Preview 5 -- Visual Studio Magazine

What's New in .NET MAUI Preview 5

By David Ramel
06/21/2021

Microsoft continues to enhance .NET MAUI (.NET Multi-platform App UI), improving animations, view transformations and single page templates, along with porting several UI components from Xamarin.Forms, the mobile dev framework which .NET MAUI is evolving.

That evolution of Xamarin.Forms involves adding support for desktop projects in addition to Android and iOS mobile platforms, specifically Windows and macOS, but not Linux.

As part of that evolution, .NET MAUI uses handlers to display an app's UI components, rather than the tightly coupled renderers used in Xamarin.Forms. Handlers are decoupled, reusable and portable.

In an update to coincide with the recent release of .NET 6 Preview 5, Microsoft's David Ortinau explained how the dev team is making progress on switching to the new scheme.

"In this release several controls now have all properties and events ported to handlers from the renderer architecture of Xamarin.Forms, including ActivityIndicator, CheckBox, Image and Stepper," said Ortinau, principal program manager, .NET Multi-platform App UI. "In previous previews you would need to check if a control was ported and register renderers from the compatibility package for those unavailable. In .NET MAUI Preview 5 we have made this much easier by updating the UseMauiApp extension (see the Startup wiki) to wire up all the controls for you, whether they are based on handlers or renderers."

Animations and transformations were also expanded, and updates to single project templates were made toward realizing the final vision of providing one project to build and deploy to all supported platforms.

The roadmap shows there's quite a longer list of new stuff planned to coincide with next month's .NET 6 Preview 2 release, including:

Alerts
App Lifecycle Events
Application Properties
Borders
CarouselView
CollectionView
Corners
ContentView
Deep Linking
Desktop Menu Items
Device
DualScreen
Frame
Gestures
IndicatorView
MenuItem (Desktop)
Native Embedding (Context factory)
Native Views
RefreshView
Shadows
Shell (Styling, Modals)
SwipeView
TabbedPage (WinUI)
Triggers

After that, new features and functionality should be fairly complete with one more preview and a release candidate focusing on bug fixes.

Developers can now learn all about .NET MAUI in newly published documentation.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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