Microsoft MAUI: please don’t Window’s 7 this..

Maui is a search term that is still only really associated with Hawaii, but if Microsoft can pull off their unification of .NET Maui will soon be associated with computer greatness, speed, and most importantly, a single UI code base 😍.

Yes, a single code base. Not this Xamarin “95%” if you’re Harry Houdini bullSh*t, but a true 100% fully shared code base with built-in resources to access native API for all modern operating systems (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows). Looking at the github for Maui it seems there are still some edge cases for adding different resources or source code files for different platforms when necessary, however getting “95%” code share has always been a dream while using Xamarin (it’s usually more in the 70% range) so the more we can close that gap the better!

Okay, now I know I went full force into this one and didn’t really share what is Maui? Microsoft's Maui (Microsoft App UI) is going to be the next evolution of Xamarin.Forms/iOS/Droid for the upcoming .NET “unification series” and will probably be ready to go around Q3 2021. There already is a github for Maui if you want to look through and make any comments/contribute but remember we still need to go through .NET 5 so this is still pretty far out in the future.

So why am I so excited? The codeshare is one, but there is one more exciting thing happening.. Since MAUI includes Blazor support it’s expected that SignalR and WebAssembly will be supported. *Note that the current (experimental) mobile bindings for Blazor uses a set of UI definitions based on the Razor syntax and not just pure HTML. In short, there are two sets of UI component definitions for Blazor: one targeting web apps, and another one targeting mobile apps. We all know WebAssembly, but SignalR is still an underrated technology in my opinion. Seeing that it will be more widely used in Maui is exciting and welcomed!