.Net Foundation Virtual User Group, 5 Aug 2020

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From YouTube: .NET MAUI - Indy .NET Consortium

Description

From our August 5, 2020 presentation.

Microsoft is consolidating UWP, Xamarin.Forms, and all other UI and cross-platform approaches into a single platform: .NET Multi Platform App UI, a.k.a. .NET MAUI. It's the latest and greatest "write once, run anywhere" - consolidating desktop, mobile, and Web development sharing a single codebase - and it's coming soon! Learn about it with us!

Presenter: Auri Rahimzadeh, Owner, Auri's Ideas
Contact: @Auri on Twitter, https://auri.net

Links from presentation:
MAUI GitHub https://github.com/dotnet/maui
Journey to One .NET https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2020/BOD106
.NET 6 Samples https://github.com/xamarin/net6-samples
.NET MAUI Intro https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi-platform-app-ui/
Reactive UI https://www.reactiveui.net/
Mobile Blazor Bindings https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile-blazor-bindings/

A

All right, so thanks again for joining tonight, uh my name's arie rahimzadeh, you can just call me re, uh I'm a full-time software engineer at the lorem reply and I also own a small company here in indy called aries ideas built a number of apps had some.

A

Pretty cool ones, uh some they're just kind of hobby but built a lot of xamarin apps, been there uh for a long time in that in that xamarin ecosystem.

A

If you want to reach out to me on twitter, it's just at re on twitter, I was one of the first people to get their name on twitter and the the funny story. Behind that uh I uh I got, I went to a tweet up, I don't know if anybody remembers those, but I had never heard of it, and so they said. Oh, you totally have to get a twitter account. I'm like oh great, okay, let's, let's do that, and so I got a re and for three months my password was password.

A

So this is before twitter was really anything. No one took my account. It was ariadre.net and my account was hurry uh with a with a password of password, uh because their website would not. Let me change my password for three months so lucky enough to get it and apparently lucky enough not to lose it.

A

So um tonight's presentation um we're gonna, go through a little bit of a history lesson yeah how we got here, how we got to maui um and really dot net five and six and uh an interesting question I was thinking about here- was yeah and I I'm not a slide reader, but still, how do you, as a microsoft developer, use microsoft technology to target every platform?

A

Yeah? Let's stop let you know, let's stop dot net and c-sharp from relegating us, as as as becoming or being considered only back-end and windows developers. Okay, we know c-sharp that doesn't mean that we can only write code that runs on windows and microsoft's. Definitely moving us in that direction has made great progress, phenomenal progress, but let's revisit this just from a historical perspective, to understand why this is so important that we are where we are today.

A

So it helps to start with just the the the evolution of windows uis, you know. So how have we built applications that the user can use in windows over the course of our microsoft development careers?

A

So I'm going to concentrate on on windows, I'm not going to go to the ms-dos side or because I mean none of that that would that was all whole mishigas. You know if you want to talk about geos and all that other stuff and desk mate yay, but different talk.

A

um So first we started out really code based when you would build your your windows apps. You know you, you see c plus plus maybe assembly, and then things got human and we got visual basic and we ended up getting eventually win forms and event driven development and it was just drag and drop, and it was you know where, where everyone was able to build an application relatively quickly. Even if they didn't know a lot of code, you could you could fumble your way through it.

A

uh The problem was, of course, you know that wasn't the same way as the c, sharp or probably the c, the c plus plus yeah. It was a whole new way of doing things you know with with winforms and then microsoft dropped on us hey. You know what we want you to be able to use these microsoft uh technologies on the web to build ui and not flash.

A

You know so because we want you to remember particular set of skills.

A

uh We want you to use microsoft tech to build all your web stuff, so yeah windows, you'll, use winforms, but for the web you'll use silverlight, and maybe you know, wpf uh great, that's, wonderful um and silverlight will use xaml uh and it'll be it'll, be great, but it'll be totally different than winforms. So now you have winforms, and you know you have two different ways. Maybe even three different ways to build your ui.

A

Then they dropped on us uwp, which had its own derivations on xaml um and started. Pushing us towards metro. Pardon me modern, because they got sued for metro and it was another way of doing things. So now you've got your your code based stuff. You've got your winform stuff. You got your silverlight stuff. You've got your uwp stuff, all all relatively incompatible.

A

The the back end code is somewhat compatible, but the the front end not, and then we got um not from microsoft but from the xamarin team uh xamarin.

A

So we have windows covered, we have the web covered and then we have windows covered again in another way. But what about multiple devices? Well, here's! What we'll do uh you're gonna still have to do. The axml and the storyboards and zibs and nibs for android and ios, but you'll, be able to share that code and you'll be able to use c-sharp and you'll be able to build for these devices, but yeah your ui won't move over.

A

So we still have this problem that if we want to support web and desktop and mobile, we have at least three different. You know, or probably four at least three different uh presentation, tier approaches, ui approaches uh totally disparate uh ui technologies, so the xamarin team came up with something pretty sweet to solve this problem, and that was xamarin forms.

A

So xamarin forms was hey. You know what.

A

How can we take this? This awesome code reuse and apply that same thing to the ui, because we're seeing the problem we're seeing the problem with uh winforms silverlight xaml uwp with metro and modern, and we won't even get into the distribution issues that we have with those for shipping, your apps, um let's, let's bring all that together and and abstract it. So they came up with xamarin forms, which was pretty amazing even in its 1.0 form, but definitely 2.0 using xaml.

A

For the most part, you could build an ios and android and a windows app you couldn't do web, but it really, I think, gave microsoft something a ponder of. hmm How could we maybe do this ourselves so shortly after xamarin forms came out, uh microsoft acquired the xamarin team.

A

I don't know if this was related, but I could see them seeing where this is going, because around the time that they were that they purchased the xamarin uh product team uh was when dot net core was starting to make take shape so pretty pretty cool stuff and then, as time went on, because xamarin forums is what five years old now four or five years old. It's about. Four.

A

Let's see when did I sell my software and then four years old and it's it's four or five years old, I don't remember exactly um microsoft started pushing uh not pushing hard but pushing xaml standard like okay. We have a few different versions of xaml. We got one that was from silverlight. We got one for uh uwp. We got one in xamarin, we're going to come up with the zam uh xaml standard, okay cool.

A

uh I don't know if that went anywhere, but you can kind of see as as microsoft developers, we've had to learn just from the ui standpoint code, winforms, silverlight and xaml, and another flavor of xaml and a couple other platforms to do ui and then yet another flavor of xaml and then another flavor of xaml and we're like stop the madness this. This is crazy. Stop this this yeah, we're learning so much, but just stick with one thing: I mean technology, that's that's a hard!

A

It's a hard promise to make, but uh pivoting a lot is very difficult and it can get expensive and the same thing happened with microsoft development.

A

So just the ui side of it was was nuts, even though we've we've started to see things moving towards consolidation, uh look at how microsoft development has moved and if you're a xamarin developer, you can definitely, I imagine, feel my pain, but if you've been in the microsoft ecosystem for a long time, like you know, 20 plus years, this this timeline um is is probably even though we're going down this way. This is probably your level of frustration, so we started out writing things in c in assembly, then visual basic made things easier.

A

We won't get into the purest argument about visual basic and we won't talk about vba much and these things weren't really much compatible with each other, but we did get com which introduced dll health, and then we got vba which by the way, was not visual basic. It just looked like it kind of like javascript as in java, but then this started consolidating a little bit into net, so yeah, let's move away from this and we'll move to net, as as microsoft developers we're very used to the ebbs and flows of new technology.

A

You know it's like every couple years: microsoft, you know back then not recently, but back then microsoft would release some new solution, sometimes ending with the letter x, and it would be possibly incompatible or partially compatible with what came before it. The the rewards were great, but the risk was high. You know, because why should I throw away my existing code base but would getting back to this so with dot net? That was a a great dream like really. We got a lot of mess here.

A

We need to start cleaning it up, but man we ran into messes right. We had comand.net and that interop, if anybody remembers.net interop and how bad that was and bringing in these those old dlls and trying to make things compatible.

A

It got a lot better as we got to.net 4 and above. But if you remember the growth of net 1.0, all the way to before four uh yikes. That was quite the growing pain and then the xamarin people were not excluded from this nightmare, because what we had was mono, which wasn't exactly.net, but you know xamarin. Originally there was no mobile version of net. There was no mac version of of of the the cli there. There wasn't um an ios version of it. There wasn't an android version of it.

A

So mono was the the open source solution to making.network cross-platform. Well, that's great, but it wasn't officially.net. So what do you do? Well it? You could still write c, sharp and and and generally everything worked, so it really wasn't a problem like behind the scenes. Unless you ran into the mono issues with xamarin, you never really noticed that mono was your problem, but sometimes you did. You had to switch between different mono versions.

A

That's a whole different story recently, but we had mono and xamarin and then in order to share the code between these different. uh Well, let me let me show this so these all worked with windows.

A

And well, this did too, but then xamarin pcl. These had issues because well were you targeting silverlight and the web. Well, if so, you can only use a subset of net which was handled by pcl, which meant portable class library.

A

So when you wrote your code, you had to hope that whatever features you wanted to use were available in the special like one one: zero one, zero, five one, four four there were all these numbers. um That said whether this would work with silverlight with windows with um what was it with, and I remember all the versions, but you know there was uh like. I think there was like even xbox. I don't remember what the details were, but the the way pcl worked where it was portable class library, it wasn't very portable.

A

It was just really bad and you usually had conflicts, and you couldn't get some functionality that you needed. Then you had other issues like mixing.net framework code or framework class libraries and its dlls with pcl dlls. These wouldn't be compatible because the pcl was targeting the wrong thing. Even though you built the portable class library with net, it wasn't fully compatible with net, as you would think of it as a developer.

A

So this you can see just from the all the lines on here, just trying to figure out what was compatible with each other across all this.

A

It wasn't a thing it was it was. It was oftentimes going down a rabbit hole, and sometimes you just give up and say: well, you know what I'm not going to target windows, I'm just going to target ios and android, uh because windows won't support whatever I need to do with this pcl. So forget it so cleaning all this mess up.

A

We started to get some semblance of solidarity right about here, so all this stuff, microsoft, finally saw and said: what are we doing? What are we doing guys uh if you've ever read clean code? It's the wtfs per minute, I'll bet. That number was straight up so, given that microsoft started pushing us towards netstandard and net core and said we're going to solve the problem of pcl, we're going to hopefully eventually solve this whole problem of mono, because we're going to go open source.

A

And we're going to solve the problem of interop we're going to solve the problem of code compatibility, we're going to solve a lot of problems we'll get that to the next slide and you've. Seen that happen, and now we have.

A

We still have some issues right. You know we have net core and dot net standard, but then we still have some conflicts right now that we're getting through, like when you have a net uh framework project uh combined with a dot net standard project, a.net a xamarin project, plus.net standard plus pcl. The point is: this: is all a big mess and microsoft has been listening to us.

A

So have they been thinking about this? I think microsoft's been pushing us towards this journey to one.net and there's a video that I've got at the end of this that I'm, I'm not gonna play the video, uh but I've got a link to it and I'll put a link in in the youtube video for this, but the journey to one.net. Let's stop the madness: let's stop the closed source stuff.

A

Let's make dot-net a first-class citizen when it comes to your development solution, not just.net for back-end or just.net for windows, dot net everywhere.

A

So here's how we're going to do this, we're going to make it available on heck, we'll make it available on a watch, a phone, a tablet: linux, mac windows, server anywhere. You want to run.net you're, going to be able to run.net and by the way, the way you're going to be able to run. It is you'll, write it and you can run it on any platform as long as it follows this chart of capabilities, which.netstandard.net core.

A

Finally solidified for us in a relatively easy to understand way, you have version numbers that, as the version numbers get higher, you get more capability. So as long as you built for one version number, you know that you have everything that came before that version number.

A

You know that version number plus everything before it, which was fascinating, because you no longer have to worry about well, okay, what version of this maps to what version of this and maps to this? And how do I combine those and what's compatible and will I need to find this nuget stuff that nuget stuff and no more mess you're? Just like? Oh, I wrote it in c sharp, I targeted.netstandardvx.net core vx, and this is what I get good.

A

It's understood, and you know what, if you don't like it fix it, because it's open source, if you have a problem with net, you have an opportunity to make it better, because net is open source now dotnet framework they're moving away, from.net framework, it's not going away where you won't be able to run your apps anymore, but they're moving you towards dotnet standard and net core. Now, that's not a bad thing because, for the most part the name spaces are the same.

A

The transition to that should not be hard, and especially, if you're a xamarin developer for the last year and a half or two, you should have been doing dot net standard anyway, because the mess of the pcl's and the shared libraries has effectively gone away. Thanks to that team, so a guiding light on getting to one.net on at least the the ui and multi-device side.

A

Xamarin is a very good example of how that can be done and if you ever want to see an example of how some of that stuff worked, I'm happy to show you now from the very beginning.

A

Microsoft wanted to go and create. What's now going to be called net5, so net framework is no longer going to be called net framework, uh starting with net five dot. Net f5 is what is going to be netstandard.net core and that's it going forward.net framework stops at what four eight I'm not sure what the number is, but anything prior to five. That's the last versions of framework and the cool thing about.net5 is its goal is to consolidate desktop web and server development.

A

It'll also have some other updates to how ui is handled, and then you can only do so much at once, so dot net 6 will actually add mobile to the mix. So net5 is where you're going to want to be when it comes to desktop web and server dev, um but then mobile.net 6., so that's at least a year away.

A

So the cool things are along with the one.net uh journey, they're they're, consolidating everything into well-known namespaces. So you really do write once run everywhere. For the most part, I mean obviously a a wind, a full-blown windows, app you're, not going to run it on a watch limitation of the device, but the libraries will be there.

A

Then a lot of consolidation, so where you used to find a lot of places all over they're doing a lot of consolidation. So a lot of cleanup, a lot of you know, which, which version of this do I use you know. uh You'll you'll, have everything in one name, space now to be fair, it's kind of like when you clean your home and then everything gets out of place later on.

A

Who knows if that's what's going to happen as time goes on, but so far from what I've been seeing, they've done a very good job of just keeping things neat and tidy and continuing along that path.

A

So we've seen this thing before um the whole. You know right once run anywhere yeah. It's it's a great dream. It's you know micros. This isn't the first time we've heard this if you've been in the game, long enough right once run anywhere is just it's. It's a promise that has often been broken and the point of it, though, is hey. I should be able to write my software once and with very few tweaks to no tweaks.

A

I should be able to run it anywhere because I don't want to pay to maintain my application across multiple platforms. This is very true. Even in game development, where you know you have common game engines like unity where you you build in the app for the most part once and you can ship it across multiple platforms, but when it comes to.

A

More generalized development, rather than game development. uh That's not really the case. We we've. We, we sort of had it with c like way in the beginning, if you wrote something in c it would compile anywhere. It didn't cover the ui, but you know you could kind of run it anywhere. Yeah, simple utilities, uh java.

A

You were able to write it and sort of run it everywhere, but the problem was: is that when it got to the destination platform, it didn't really look like an app from that platform. uh You, you noticed, like buttons, didn't look the same drop-down list, weren't the same. It was slow and one of the other issues with the jvms that were out there is that there were multiple versions of it. So there wasn't like one single jvm right.

A

You know owned at the time by sun mac os had its own microsoft had its own sun had its own uh ibm had their own. I remember this mess and if you didn't have the right one installed that class file that you ran, wouldn't it wouldn't it wouldn't load because of some issue with the jvm, but you were told. Oh, it's a java app should work, oh well, you should install this jvm.

A

So it's always like well install this version of windows on windows. It's was, it was very bad. The java experience great promise uh absolutely failed execution. Now. A great solution, though, to write once run anywhere uh has been the web and we've definitely seen it we're kind of using it right now uh with teams. As I recall, teams is an electron app, it's written in html, css and javascript and then uses probably signalr, and you know various rest apis through graph.

A

You know to bring you the the the experience that you've got, but that that application is written with javascript, so pretty fascinating. You could take a java, a javascript powered solution and run it on almost any device. It runs on watches. It runs on the in the cloud you know like node. It runs on the the on mobile with, say, react or native scripts or react native and native script. It runs on the web with react and angular.

A

It runs already like I said, on the desktop with electron and I think atomic I think, that's another one.

A

So pretty fascinating, you know javascript! Is that, like you know, as long as you know it you can you can you can write for basically any platform, uh but javascript doesn't cover the ui issue uh and of course it's javascript, so you know yeah. You live with javascript because it's like a necessary evil, um but then again I'm I'm generally a dot-net developer. So I'm not trying to start a religious war. I was not gaslighting. I promise you um xamarin got us close because you could write c.

A

You know your entire application in c sharp, but then it didn't handle the ui, but it was pretty cool being able to take your back-end server, your your winforms, app or uwp app. um All your service. You know, tiers your common models, your utility to your all that stuff, maybe even caching, who knows what and reuse all of that in your mobile app, which meant, if you fixed something like.

A

If you found a bug in your mobile app, you could fix it the logic in one place and probably fix it across well, basically, everywhere, if you found a bug, it was really right once run anywhere, which gets back to that whole re. You know: share code, lower cost, you don't have to hire an ios and an android developer. You hire a net developer uh now to be fair, just because just for those who are new to xamarin, knowing csharp.net does not make you an android or ios developer.

A

You still need to understand how ios works and android works just like if you're a winforms developer. That knows c-sharp. That does not make you a good back-end api developer, because you're used to possibly one user using one computer at one time, not a thousand users making 10 000 requests a minute to a server at one time. So just knowing the language doesn't translate to the the next platform.

A

Now xamarin forums solved the problem with xamarin, which was okay. Now we're going to handle this, the ui part of it and you'll have even more code, reuse, even more savings, even lower cost, uh but there were trade-offs and it wasn't exactly windows like you, weren't, really it wasn't somewhere where you were replacing all your windows apps suddenly with xamarin.

A

It was really mobile. First, even though uwp was in there, it wasn't exactly building windows apps and it also had this. It still has this kind of strange structure of the franken project um where your resources, while the the code and the ui, might be shareable. The resources are not like.

A

You have to treat fonts a certain way on android and you have to treat them another way on ios and then another way on uh uwp and then, if you want to target tizen, which xamarin supports for the mac uh still similar issues, so you don't get 100 reuse, but it's it's! It's very good. It's it's really good. If you've used it, it's very nice um react native was an interesting process. It was kind of like what xamarin forms was doing oop what xamarin forms was doing, but with javascript so like.

A

If, if you already knew net, you could build, you know with xamarin, you know. If you already knew csharp.net, you could build a mobile app and you know, and a mac app and a tizen app and boom you're done uh react. Native was kind of the same thing, but for javascript now it had limitations because javascript doesn't make like coco libraries or jars.

A

So, while react native was very cool and if you were already a javascript shop, it made sense to go the react native route or the native script route because you could reuse your code. The problem was: is that if you wanted to get into the a feature that didn't exist in react native, you had to drop in and go build your your java jar or your. You know your your swift. uh Was it a nib, not cocoapod? I don't know.

A

I don't remember what the shareable library is in in ios, but uh you you basically have to go drop into the native platform and write it in that language. So for ios it would be objective c or swift and then on android. It would be java.

A

So all of a sudden, you're you're losing the benefit of javascript, because you gotta have guys that know android and ios to support the additional components, whereas xamarin forms everything is c sharp, so yeah you could write the additional components you needed all in c sharp and still get a native library out of it, which was the big difference with xamarin versus like react native, so uh maui we'll we'll get to that in a bit.

A

The the keys here are, it sounds, like you know, microsoft's moving us all in one direction, but back to my original premise, as as microsoft developers and c-sharp devs we're kind of thought of as back-end guys. You know back-end developers where you know windows developers, maybe server, but you know you're a dot net developer. I need a web guy and that's a javascript guy or if I'm mobile, I need a an you know, a java guy or a swift or ios guy, and that's a bummer because c sharp is a fantastic language.

A

F, sharp, very good from what I've heard. I'm not an f sharp guy, but why? Why do we need? um What? How can we take that that that knowledge of ours to other to to all the other areas of software development? Why do we have to keep using these helper languages like when we're building a website?

A

Why do we have to write so much stuff in javascript just to do front end stuff?

A

Why can't we use c sharp and that's where microsoft is, is now pushing us they've, consolidated the.net framework for the most part into netstandard and net core and now they're expanding the net languages specifically right now c sharp to be first-class citizens for things other than back-end development. So uh look at blazer.

A

You can use c-sharp yeah to build the front end now two and mix c sharp with html and have a front-end experience that you call into dot-net libraries and boom. You can code the exact same way using the same name spaces, and do it all on the front end and you can instantly there's. You know other cool things. We did a presentation last month about blazer. If you go take a look at that, you can learn more about it.

A

Nick george presented it great presentation, but really the the the question is, is why aren't we using c sharp the same informal way? We use every other language like. Why can't we use c sharp instead of javascript or instead of python, we already have the skill, so let's go and reuse it across all the platforms across all the devices across any uh need that we have rather than ah this one requires javascript, and this one requires python, because I need to write it quickly.

A

So that's where microsoft is pushing us now and yeah dot net, which I'm calling soon the framework formerly known as net core is. Is this this path forward and it will bring that consolidation for us, so this has brought us to maui uh on on the ui side. So if you don't know what it is, it's multi-application ui. uh It was announced at build a couple months ago, a couple months ago, uh and it's not entirely new.

A

I mean it's, it's it's going to be all new, but it's not going to be a one of those microsoft's throwing something away and forcing us to learn something new. That's not it! It's not that again it's an evolution of xamarin forms. So if you already know, xamarin forms you're going to be right at home with dotnet maui. So if you're already a c-sharp developer, you already know like xaml uh and especially if you know xamarin forms you're going to be good to go.

A

Of course, there'll be a learning curve, it's new but good to go. So you still get a cross-platform native ui but they're getting rid of that whole franken project thing uh we'll get into that in more detail in a bit I'll show you some examples, uh but a single project single code base, so kind of like um you'll you'll build just like you built a winforms, app yeah. You could build a xamarin app and that's it you don't have your xamarin.

A

You know app uh like your xamarin forms app and then your ios app here and then your android app here and they're just calling into the xamarin forms. Instance: that's gone, it's just gonna be a dot-net maui app and that and you move forward uh now.

A

This isn't gonna be available. This year, it'll be available in preview this year, but it's not going to be finalized. This year, it's coming in.net 6., we'll get into details uh in a bit um cool things, though remember microsoft's, concentrating on consolidation of everything into dotnetstandard.net core.

A

So xamarin is going to be absorbed into system.ui, it's just another ui inside insideof.net. That's it it's going to be part of net's ui. It's not going to be xamarin forms in.net it's going to be in system.ui and you get it, which is pretty sweet, xamarin essentials. If you don't know what it is, that's a library of a whole bunch of very cool capabilities that um are cross-platform device capabilities that xamarin essentials then exposes to you, there's more to it than that.

A

But the the key is: that's also going to be moved in following that namespace consolidation into system.devices.

A

Now, right now, I don't know that I fully agree that that's where xamarin essentials should go, because I know xamarin essentials. This is all subject to change. So what I'm telling you now might be different next month as to where they end up putting these things, but the gist of what maui is going to bring. You is not changing.

A

Now all the native namespaces, so if you do xamarin development and you're accessing you know like um ui kit and so forth, and you know the the google apis all those namespaces, those are staying the same. Those aren't touching those aren't being touched which makes sense because those aren't part of net really. Those are part of the various platforms. Ios is sdk. That's ios, android sdk, it's android! That's not part of net, nothing stopping you from calling into it any just like any other library that you've got. So that's not going to change.

A

It's not going to be a paradigm shift for how you write components for the native languages. How you do that? I'm still curious, because I haven't seen good examples of that yet, but we'll we'll get there um now the other thing we're no longer going to have xamarin, ios and xamarin android. That goes away and, as I understand it, mono finally goes away. Yes, yes, we'll, finally, have.net written by microsoft as part of the open source project uh and it'll be the same everywhere. Not oh! This one has an issue with mono.

A

No, no more of that mess which should give us a performance improvement. That's my thought anyway! uh So that's going to be now, it's going to be called net for android and net for ios, so no more 50 different. You know, jvms, like java, had issues with nope there's going to be this one runtime for each platform, everything set, which is finally great and, as I said before, if you have a problem with any of this, you can change it because dot net is open. Source maui is open, source xamarin is open source.

A

You can go. Look at that right now and start taking a look at it now.

A

What happens to you if you're a net developer, you're a microsoft developer or you're a xamarin developer with maui? Well, the good news is nothing's changed. If you want to build your ui in xaml because remember this is multi-application ui.

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You can do that if you want to write it with code, you can do that and the reactive extensions you can still do that. None of that's going away, but you might know, oh and and of course mvvm if you're a xamarin developer, yeah mvvm, that's not going away! These two go together pretty well! So I just kind of say: xaml, um but you'll notice, a couple cool things here: cool new ones, mvu model view update and blazer.

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What's this we'll get into that, so nvu is pretty cool, uh so this is what mvu looks like so it's code based ui generation, look how cool this is body of the application. It's a new stack layout and a label add a button and here's the functionality for it.

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Isn't that awesome.

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I'm looking forward to playing with this, it is from what I've seen it's very cool yeah. Now I am a xaml guy. I like building my apps with xamarin forms. I like xaml, um but I have no problem with this, especially if I'm writing like reusable components. This could be very useful, we'll see, you know it's always on a case-by-case basis with with any sort of software now, even cooler for all of you, folks that you know are like well. Why? Wouldn't I just use react?

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Well, you don't have to. If you know blazer, you could use html like syntax, no laney, you can't present.

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You could use html like syntax and then wire up code just like in blazer, because it is blazer. It's called mobile, blazer bindings right now, but isn't that amazing? So this is coming with maui and you can actually use mobile blazer bindings now I believe so. This is something I definitely want to play around with, but pretty fascinating, especially if you know html pretty well and you're, more comfortable or you're comfortable with blazer or razer. uh This works out really well for you.

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So, uh on top of the these two cool new mvu and mobile blazer bindings, everything is consolidated, so everything that you used to do separately before that you would manage in your android app you'd manage in your ios app and you'd manage in your uwp app and you'd manage in your mac os app you'd manage in your tizen app and they were all incompatible.

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You know like the the different sizes of things, the fonts, you know it's just there's just a lot of issues. All of that gets consolidated. So all your re, all your fonts end up in a resources, fonts, folder everything. That's an image ends up in resources, images. How easy is that, on the platform side, um you put your platform specific code in the specific folders for those apps and or those platforms, simple clean. Now how they're going to do the more complex stuff like if I have a lot of stuff in there?

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um I'm not sure what that looks like yet. But then again, you know this is very canary uh canary is, is basically microsoft's term for alpha um now, microsoft is not abandoning xamarin for maui this year, they're, not they're gonna like just stop development on it that that's not happening at all.

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What's happening, they're going to continue updating, xamarin ios xamarin forms, while maui is being developed and it should be a clean transition because, based on everything, I'm seeing a lot of that stuff's just moving into the consolidated area and the new name spaces, and I'm not even sure that there's going to be a lot of namespace change other than instead of bringing in xamarin forms, you know using xamarin.forms you'll, say using system.ui, so it doesn't, it doesn't seem like it would be rough and it seems better. um I was also talking with the mfractor team.

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uh If you haven't used m fracture, that's like uh resharper for uh for xamarin developers, um and now it's available on windows too, which is very cool. uh It's it's. The an absolute necessary toolkit to have if you're a xamarin developer just makes everything so much easier. They will support that um this also uh one thing I didn't bring up, which I was just looking at my bullet point: um there's no more special treatment of resources.

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So if you've ever written an ios or an android, app you've been missing that one image that you forgot to drag into one of your drawable folders, but you did add it to ios and things look weird. This is going to solve that stuff for you, which is, which is really useful.

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uh Also very cool you'll be able to debug in windows enough that you couldn't do that right now, but you can plug in an iphone and debug on windows, it'll also debug in a windows emulator like just like kind of the uwp stuff by default, so that because it's all maui, you can launch that immediate, fast emulator, if you like, but you don't have to it's very slick, very slick and yeah I'll get into this. But if you really want to you can write your your app with vs code.

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So what does some of this stuff look? Like so remember, I was saying uh that everything's consolidated, look right here, there's just a platforms. Folder, so there's your xaml there's your app that kicks things off, but look at that. You just have platforms and resources. That's it nice and clean, no more franken project and you can see how this expands look, how nice that is! There's all your true type, fonts there's where your images go so much cleaner. Now what about those dependencies?

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You know right, you know like if you have your own bluetooth adapter there you go. There's your different implementations of things, nice and clean.

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I'm very excited about this. If you can't tell this is where you can plug in your iphone and start debugging to it very cool stuff.

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You'll also see the package reference, it's just system.maui system device, so this is xamarin forms, and this is xamarin essentials.

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So, let's move on very excited about this.

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So let's do a little bit of a breakdown of of kind of. What's changing like what are the impacts going to be for you um for the most part, I don't think this will be a problem, so xamarin forms versus maui, so android 19 versus 21, plus, um okay, you know so if you need to use earlier versions of android, okay,.

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Now keep in mind, this doesn't come out for a little bit. So where are we at right now, ap at? Where are we at 23? I got to remember. I don't look at those numbers that often, but you should be relatively safe with this. However, you're not really running into a lot of issues, sticking with xamarin forms. For now. This does not mean that you have to update your xamarin forms application to maui, because everything will suddenly stop working come december of next year.

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That's not what's happening, so you have time to get used to this and figure out how you might move cool things you'll see now. uh Microsoft is supporting a lot more, so microsoft will support the windows. Implementation. Microsoft will support the mac os implementation. So if you want to write mac, apps yay, um they already take care of the android and ios side. For us, uh linux will still be supported by the community ties in, of course, by samsung.

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Now they're loosely coupling things now. So, instead of everything having to you know worry about bindable objects, they're hoping to get performance improvements by loosely coupling them.

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You'll also see the stuff that I already talked about uh the additional stuff like the blazer mobile bindings in mvu.

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You'll see we're single project now multi-targeting multi-window, pretty cool stuff, now little gotcha here. This is using.net 6, because remember it's dotnet for ios and net for android.

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The beautiful thing here I feel at least is mono goes away. No more of this mono stuff.

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um If you've ever dealt with mono issues, it is not a fun thing to diagnose, they've, actually hidden the ability to set the mondo ver, the mono version behind a feature flag in the latest versions of visual studio. I got stuck with that recently. I asked about they're like oh yeah. We put that behind a feature flag like oh thank you, um so you can just follow this. You know sdk style, you know dot net cli. Yes, you could even build your stuff with visual studio code.

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If you so desire, uh they did have an example of that in the video that I was telling you about which I will link to.

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Now, when are we going to get this well, the preview is going to come this winter, so maybe around.net when dotnet5 is officially released. I think that's around november, but it's it's it's it's this winter and the key is, it will likely be part of a.net 6 preview. So maui is not part of dot net 5..

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You don't get mauin.net 5, but you should be getting it in the preview of net 6..

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Now they've been very clear that this is a lot of work. uh This isn't just like a feature update with a new name. This is a ground-up rewrite of the renderers and doing dotnet for ios and net for android. That's a pretty big effort. It's it's!

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I can only imagine it's a lot of work so kudos to them for for taking on this big bite, uh but the the expected release date is next winter. So my guess is you know, because it looks like you know: the the yearly cadence of net versions.

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If that's going to be the case, then you'd be seeing it in winter of 2021.

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So let we'll we'll see, though, now uh what about windows now microsoft to build, talked about they're coming out with wind, ui three, so uwp is basically becoming winui3.

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My guess this is my guess. They didn't speak to it is that all of this is going to end up rolling into system.ui, so my guess is: uwp eventually is going to become maui.

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So I'm hoping because I'd like to see just uwp and all this stuff, like these new names, go away and you just write everything with maui.

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So we'll see we'll see too early to say now does maui solve everything? Does it give us the right once run anywhere uh solution? I think it's pretty close, uh but we don't know yet so I'm I'm excited for it. um I'm cautiously optimistic, but it seems that especially with xamarin uh microsoft has delivered on their promises. I don't know if you ever listened to the uh the xamarin podcast, but you know you always see them adding new features and they're very open about working with the community.

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So if there's some new capability that somebody wants and they write it and they do a pull request and it gets accepted, it becomes part of xamarin.

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That's that's pretty cool that kind of access to you know eating your own dog food and and getting yourself better dog food. uh I I just don't know that I've seen the like of it before um so very excited, we'll see in q4 where this goes. uh We we've we've heard this promise before, but uh it seems like they're getting there and they have the right team to do it.

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If you've seen their work, they definitely seem to have the right team to do it and to be fair as xamarin developers other than like the franken prod kind of thing. Xamarin is pretty amazing. Now you can do some pretty amazing stuff with it uh just and and ship a phenomenal product, and it's still cross-platform.

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You don't have to hire all these extra developers just to support each platform. uh You know really, you just need a contractor for the ui and then you know your.net guys can take care of pretty much everything else.

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That's that there's a lot to be said about that versus bringing in you know, contractors for the ios and the android side to handle that language part of all your net stuff, but we'll see I I hope that this is going in the direction it seems it is. You know where we have a great product, so we'll we'll definitely learn more later this year.

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So if you want to learn more here's some links, I'm I'm going to go and put these out there, so you don't have to go and write these down or screenshot it or whatever I'll post the the link to this video after it's processed on the dotnet consortium website uh I on the meetup site. So I don't know what the net foundation is going to do. They usually link to the video as well, but I don't know how that works so maui on github. If you want to see it today, just go right there.

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um This is a fascinating discussion about how microsoft got to one.net so check that out. If you want to see what dot net 6 looks like take a look, um there's a good little intro to maui and y right there, the reactive extensions I haven't used them as much. You know, but hey if you want to learn more about them right there, the rx ui and then, if you want to learn more about those mobile blazer bindings right.

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Erase all my little messages- and that's that's all I got for this evening- uh thank you very much. If you have any questions, uh let me know and um I'll stick around for some questions.

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See if I can switch back there, we go thanks. Jay.

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Does anyone have any questions feel free to feel free to ask I'm glad that you liked it thanks kevin thanks, dominic thanks john yay. Thank you monty any questions comments.

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If you have any questions, um oh yeah, uh any more comments about oz code. Well, I mean I'm clearly a big fan of oz code, so I use it all the time uh across all my machines, so I've been using it for a while. Someone brought that up. Oh yeah, I did miss the compact framework you're right. You know what I actually wrote.

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uh uh Anyone ever seen those those uh those websites that like make random shakespearean, insults or buzzword generators like you choose one thing from column, a column b, column c, so I wrote this buzzword generator for actually I've written for the newton, but I ended up writing it in uh windows, ce with uh embedded vb with the net compact framework yep, uh and I have stories about that by the way. uh So you know you can make fifth generation hardware contingency scenarios with time phase management opportunity to further the corporate stratagem.

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That's like the kind of bs that I can make with the app you know, just by choosing from the different columns um but yeah funny story about the compact framework. If you get a speeding ticket in indiana, um I wrote the software that writes you the ticket, so me and my team, but it was my company and it was. uh We had a lot of memory leaks because we had to write it in in dot net ce and oh man, you were calling the garbage collector all the time.

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It was this window ce handheld device and you were constantly calling gc collect because of a uh a leak, a memory leak in the bitmap handling, so to have a good ui. We had to do all this stuff behind the scenes to make it not terrible.

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uh That's a great question. My my guess is that um I know they were talking about pairing with them. Tandy so shoot me an email and I'll see. If I can get you an answer for that, my guess is that it's going to be the same thing that they did with netfor ios and dotnet for android that they're just going to do that same thing. Basically, probably a one-to-one thing uh to move you over to dotnet, but I don't know that's, that's! That's just a guess!

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So I'll try to get you that answer but shoot me an email, here's my email address.

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um Let me answer the oz code question and then I'll answer that other question from you tom, uh so ozcode. If you haven't used it, please use it. It's very cool, especially when it comes to like link, debugging or exporting objects, but take a look uh if you, if you send us your emails or if you prime me, if you send me an email about it. So again I put my email address in there um uh I'll choose someone to get the oz code.

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uh When no lady, you can't give away oz code and you couldn't use it so anyway, uh it'd be funny. No, you can't use oscode. um Now. Let me look at tom's question.

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I'm pretty new to c-sharp and.net wanting to get deeper, but I don't want to paint myself into corners from what I'm gathering here. I should probably focus on learning and building in blazer and xamarin. um Well, it's up to you. What you want to do I so one thing I have found is that xamarin, um web or mobile gives you kind of a sense of accomplishment that feels really good.

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You know the the ap when you go and you build an api, you can't really show off an api, but you know you could build a mobile, app and kind of get your feet wet on building the application.

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What you want it to do and then that will actually naturally lead you along the path to building an api uh that you interact with, so I think going either a xamarin or a blazer route and starting with kind of like stuff you can kind of see and play around with, will lead you along the path to building out all the other structure of your application.

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If you haven't used that, if you haven't used microsoft, learn before check out microsoft, learn, let me send you a link here: um microsoft, let's say microsoft learn and they have entire tracks.

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um That'll walk you through how to do some amazing stuff. So here's here's the link here, tom there we go um and if you go there, you'll see all the different tracks. So take a look at the thing that says: learning paths I'll share my screen and just show you.

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Like if I can there we go if you can see this, you know you can click on learning paths and browse all learning options.

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And you can see you can actually just look for xamarin, um I think. Is it mobile? I know there's it's here somewhere, um maybe it's uh xamarin.

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I think it's as simple as that yeah, so creating a mobile app. So these are modules, but I remember they have learning paths see so here's how to consume rest services. That will be good, but I would start with this one build mobile apps with xamarin forms um and I'll give you that link.

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And if you go there, that'll start you along the path and then uh when you want to save data in different places, where you want to share things with other people, you'll you'll have a base application. You can start with and then start adding new capabilities. The other thing I think you should learn about as you go through your learning path, is source control, so learn about git in visual studio.

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Because, as you make changes to your application, you don't want to be that guy, that's you know, making backup copies of all your folders. You know so as long as you're comfortable with git. I think your your learning curve will be less steep good sounds like you're hip deep in that, um oh, the coved, app in fishers. uh That's working out great! um We haven't had any issues with it, it's kind of strange.

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So if you don't know about it, I built a a mobile app for the city of fishers, where we get free covet testing and they they call me up on a on a saturday and said: hey. uh We need to start scanning people in next week and we're thinking of using like a laptop and a handheld scanner and we're gonna have a printer in there and it'll print out labels and all this stuff, I'm like. Oh, no, no, no! No! No! No! No! No!

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This screams mobile app, you already have. They already had a qr code, so we came up with a barcode strategy and it's a it's. A xamarin forms app and I wrote it in like a day if you go to re.net just go to my website here. It is um there's a whole thing about how we built it and it hasn't crashed at all. It's just. It's just been running we're getting people through uh the line in two minutes.

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Each patient is two minutes.

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You scan them in swab swab. They go out.

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It's it's pretty fascinating, so they process what like a thousand people a week, yeah thanks john, um but yeah. If you go to, let me let me see if um I can look at re.net, um I should have it in there here. It is building a coven patient scanning app in 24 hours.

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So if you want to read about that, that's how it was built and if you're curious how we did anything just shoot me an email and I'll help you out as best I can any other.

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Questions I heard someone unmute but other than that, any other questions, no all right. Well then, thank you all very much. uh I hope you have a wonderful evening, uh I'll put the video to this up as soon as it's done. Processing I'm going to stop recording now.