Build 2022: .NET MAUI is Now Generally Available
- Paul Thurrott
- May 24, 2022
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Microsoft announced today that its .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) is now generally available for cross-platform app development.
“This release marks a new milestone in our multi-year journey to unify the .NET platform,” Microsoft’s David Ortinau writes in the announcement post. “Now you and over 5 million other .NET developers have a first-class, cross-platform UI stack targeting Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows to complement the .NET toolchain (SDK) and base class library (BCL). You can build anything with .NET.”
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A replacement for the earlier Xamarin technologies, .NET MAUI allows developers to create a single Visual Studio project that targets each of the supported platforms side-by-side. Apps created with MAUI will look and behave natively on each platform, and developers can use its 40 extensible controls, layouts, and pages to create apps with menu bars, new animation capabilities, borders, corners, shadows, graphics, and, on desktop, multiple windows.
.NET MAUI also provides APIs for developers to access services and features like accelerometers, app actions, file systems, notifications, and so on. It integrates with Blazor so you can reuse existing Blazor web UI components to create hybrid apps. And because it’s based on .NET 6, it supports new C# features like global using statements and file scoped namespaces.
This first version of .NET MAUI will be supported for 18 months and will be serviced monthly like other .NET releases. To get started, install or update Visual Studio 2022 Preview to version 17.3 Preview 1.1 and choose the “.NET Multi-platform App UI development” workload. Support for MAUI will come to the generally available version of Visual Studio 2022 later this year.