News
.NET 10 Preview 2 Enhances Blazor, .NET MAUI
In Microsoft's new .NET 10 Preview 2, the Blazor component that lives in the ASP.NET Core web-dev framework received the most attention along with .NET MAUI.
According to the release notes, however, that attention was mostly devoted to small fixes, features and functionality, as was the case in Preview 1, which shipped a few weeks ago.
The ASP.NET Core & Blazor section of a March 18 announcement of .NET 10 Preview 2 shows eight items, ranging from "Reconnection UI component added to the Blazor Web App project template" to "New authentication and authorization metrics."
Meanwhile, .NET MAUI -- the successor to Xamarin.Forms, which evolved with the addition of desktop app support in addition to mobile -- wasn't far behind.
Here's a summary of what's new in those two properties.
ASP.NET Core & Blazor Enhancements
Web developers get several quality-of-life improvements. Blazor now has a built-in reconnection UI in the Blazor Web App template to handle dropped connections, and navigation is smoother (avoiding page scroll-to-top on same-page navigation and improving NavLink behavior).
On the server side, ASP.NET Core improves OpenAPI support -- XML comments in your controllers are now included in generated Swagger/OpenAPI docs, and the OpenAPI library has been updated to the latest version.
Additionally, new metrics for authentication and authorization have been added to help monitor and debug security issues in web applications.
.NET MAUI (Mobile UI)
Cross-platform app development with .NET MAUI gained several new capabilities. Notable additions include a ShadowTypeConverter (making it easier to define shadows in XAML), a new OffColor property for Switch controls (to customize the switch's off state color), and a HybridWebView.InvokeJavascriptAsync method for calling JavaScript in embedded web views.
There are also tweaks like the ability to style modals as popovers on iPads and some deprecated APIs as the framework evolves.
Other New Features & Functionality
Here's a summary of the other minor new fixes, features and functionality across the framework.
- Mobile Platform Quality: The Android and iOS/macOS (Xamarin/Maui) workloads in .NET 10 Preview 2 focused on bug fixes and reliability improvements. While no major new mobile-specific features were introduced this time, there were numerous quality enhancements for .NET on Android, iOS, Mac Catalyst, tvOS, and related platforms (detailed change lists and known issues for these platforms are available on their GitHub release pages available in the linked documentation and release notes).
- Windows Forms: Desktop developers using WinForms will see improved interoperability and tooling. .NET 10 Preview 2 enables clipboard sharing between WinForms and WPF (making it easier to copy data between these UI frameworks). It also ports more design-time UI type editors from the .NET Framework, enhancing the Windows Forms designer experience in Visual Studio. General quality improvements (bug fixes and optimizations) are included as well.
- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF): WPF apps benefit from performance improvements and updated visuals. This preview includes optimizations for better render performance, some Fluent design style updates to align with the latest Windows look-and-feel, as well as numerous bug fixes. These changes make WPF applications faster and ensure they stay modern with Windows UI trends.
- Entity Framework Core 10: Data access gets more powerful with EF Core 10 now supporting the new LINQ
RightJoin operator. In addition to the LeftJoin added in Preview 1, you can use RightJoin in LINQ queries to perform right outer joins, keeping all results from the right-hand sequence and matching records from the left-hand sequence. EF Core will translate this into a SQL RIGHT JOIN under the hood. A few other minor enhancements are also included in this release.
- Container Images: .NET 10 Preview 2 introduces Native AOT SDK container images, which allow you to build and deploy ahead-of-time compiled applications more easily in Docker. These new images can produce self-contained, trim, AOT-compiled apps for faster startup and lower memory usage, benefiting microservices and cloud deployments.
More information is available in the .NET 10 Preview 2 release notes and a livestreamed unboxing video.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.