Here’s What’s New in .NET MAUI in .NET 8

With the release today of .NET 8, .NET MAUI—Microsoft’s cross-platform app development platform—takes another step forward on the desktop. It may be the closest we ever get to a new and modern platform for creating native Windows apps.

“We build .NET MAUI to enable .NET developers to create cross-platform applications for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows with deep native integrations, platform-native user interfaces, and hybrid experiences that extend the reach of Blazor and other web UI technologies,” Microsoft’s David Ortinau writes in the announcement post. “Today marks the third major release of .NET MAUI in the past 18 months which turns the corner from our unifying of the Xamarin platform with .NET into pushing forward .NET as one.”

One of the biggest pushes in this release was quality—check out Jonathan Peppers’s separate recent post about just the performance improvements in this release if you want a lot of detail—with the .NET MAUI project merging over 1600 GitHub pull requests and fixing almost 690 bugs since .NET 7. But I’m particularly interested in how MAUI helps developers build apps that bridge the desktop and mobile worlds. (And, with Blazor, the web world, too.) And some of the new features reflect this role:

Keyboard accelerators. This feature, which is common on desktop apps, lets the developer add a keyboard shortcut to any item in a menu, obvious examples being CTRL + C for “Copy” and CTRL + V for “Paste.” And now you can do this easily in MAUI using straightforward XAML syntax.

Pointer gesture improvements. MAUI uses a pointer gesture recognizer to detect when a mouse pointer is moving around the app when run on a desktop system. In .NET 8, Microsoft added two new events, PointerPressed and PointerReleased, that provide a lot more information about the mouse pointer, and they work across Android, iPadOS, Mac Catalyst, and Windows.

Drag and drop enhancements. MAUI now provides additional drag-and-drop functionality on Windows, Mac Catalyst, and iOS. On Windows, you can now add a custom glyph and custom captions when the user drags an object. And on Mac and iOS, you can add custom shapes or images, or customize a drop action to indicate whether it’s a Copy, Move, or not allowed.

.NET MAUI with .NET 8 is part of Visual Studio 2022 17.8, which was just released today as well. But you can also develop in MAUI using Visual Studio Code on any desktop platform with the .NET MAUI extension.