Microsoft Delays .NET MAUI to Mid-2022

Predictably, Microsoft won’t meet its overly aggressive schedule for the .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI), its more modern and capable replacement for Xamarin.

“Unfortunately, .NET MAUI will not be ready for production with [the general availability of] .NET 6 in November,” Microsoft director Scott Hunter admitted. “We want to provide the best experience, performance, and quality on day 1 to our users and to do that, we need to slip the schedule. We are now targeting early Q2 of 2022 for [the general availability of] .NET MAUI.”

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

.NET MAUI expands on the mobile app creation capabilities of Xamarin to also include Windows and macOS, and so it can be seen as a Microsoft-oriented competitor to Google’s Flutter, albeit one that doesn’t support web apps too. (That said, MAUI does provide “native container and controls for Blazor hybrid scenarios” which can target web apps.)

“.NET MAUI is a wrapper framework and development experience in Visual Studio that abstracts native UI frameworks [that are] already available, [including] WinUI for Windows, Mac Catalyst for macOS/iPadOS, iOS, and Android,” Hunter explains. “Although it’s not another native UI framework, there is still a significant amount of work to provide optimal development and runtime experiences across these devices.”

Microsoft had originally planned to ship .NET MAUI alongside .NET 6 this November, and while the former won’t make that schedule as I predicted, the latter will: .NET 6 will be generally available in November alongside a new version of Visual Studio. However, .NET MAUI Preview 8 is now available for developers interested in kicking the virtual tires along with Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4.

You can learn more about the .NET MAUI schedule on the project’s Roadmap page on GitHub.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 5 comments

  • awright18

    15 September, 2021 - 9:00 am

    <p>Well that’s unfortunate, but there are alternative’s that exist for people to use today. Hopefully it will be that much better when it does launch. </p>

  • mog0

    15 September, 2021 - 12:39 pm

    <p>Technically it was scheduled to ship with .Net 5, not 6 but they split some of the stuff from 5, including MAUI, off to for .Net 6</p>

  • rmac

    15 September, 2021 - 3:14 pm

    <p>I’d say overly ambitious, and unnecessary. </p><p><br></p><p>The original .NET mantra of Windows + web was abandoned quite some time ago. Essentially there remains a digital divide in MS. You can see it on the Fluent UI site. Not a single mention of Blazor (only React), and you can hear it in comments like those from Lander concerning Blazor: ‘I Don’t See a Grand Unified App Model in the Future’, which ironically flies in the face of MAUI’s goal.</p><p><br></p><p>So instead MS focus on a bug ridden Xamarin vNext aka MAUI. I can’t see how it will ever be satisfactory. As for the latest VS preview (4.1), I’ve never seen so many issues in such a near to launch version like this.</p>

  • thewerewolf

    15 September, 2021 - 7:55 pm

    <p>The core problem is that Xamarin.Forms abandoned the platform agnostic design of WPF to go backwards to the OS native control approach .Net Forms meaning every control has to be carefully crafted and kept up to date with each revision of the host OS.</p><p><br></p><p>With WPF, the only part you have to update and port is the underlying renderer (DirectX on Windows) and the hooks for keyboard and mouse messages. That’s why Silverlight worked well even on browsers on other platforms.</p><p><br></p><p>Where the Xamarin team keep missing it is that a WPF based approach would allow theming to make the controls identical to the native ones by default and that would only have to be updated with the visuals or behaviours change – and would be a much simpler task. </p><p><br></p><p>Worse, they grafted XAML on top of what was essentially Xamarin.Forms – then changed the syntax arbitrarily, breaking any kind of mapping to Forms OR WPF while looking ‘kinda’ like it.</p><p><br></p><p>Definitely a case of ploughing on when MAUI was a chance to start over with the Sliverlight source and adapt accordingly.</p>

    • eric_rasmussen

      Premium Member
      16 September, 2021 - 1:06 pm

      <p>I think that’s why Flutter has been so successful. They render everything and don’t rely on any native controls. It makes crafting pixel perfect layouts way easier than it ever was in Xamarin.</p><p><br></p><p>I never understood why Microsoft locked WPF to Windows only. It’s the ideal cross platform framework, essentially Flutter before Flutter existed. I personally prefer the code-first approach that Flutter takes over the XAML/C# split that WPF took, but had it been cross platform I wouldn’t have cared.</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC