Are your apps keyboard accessible? Let’s take a look: Launch one of your apps. Attach a physical keyboard if one is not already attached to your device. Navigate your app as you typically would, and use only your keyboard to do so. How did that go? Was it easy? Did it match your typical experience navigating your app? Ensuring your app experiences are just as awesome when navigated exclusively via keyboard is essential to building an app experience that is inclusive and accessible to all. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) To understand what exactly constitutes keyboard accessibilit ..read more

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit team is proud to introduce to you version 8 of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit! In this latest major release, we’re bringing you the much anticipated TouchBehavior (previously known as the TouchEffect). But also, beware of breaking changes for the Snackbar on Windows and did you know that you could color the Android navigation bar? TouchBehavior If you have been using the Xamarin Community Toolkit in your Xamarin.Forms app, you probably know about the TouchEffect. Since .NET MAUI, Effects have been deprecated and those should be migrated to (Platform)Behaviors ..read more

Apple is introducing a privacy policy for including privacy manifest files in new and updated applications targeted for iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS platforms on the App Store. Note that macOS apps are excluded at least for the time being. The privacy manifest file (PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy) lists the types of data your .NET MAUI applications, or any third-party SDKs and packages collect, and the reasons for using certain Required Reason APIs categories. At the time of writing Apple is already sending out notices about including this policy in your apps. As of May 1, 2024, this will be mandatory in orde ..read more

With 2023 behind, let’s take a moment to reflect on the journey of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit project and what is next. This open-source library serves as a companion to .NET MAUI, offering developers a rich set of controls, converters, and helpers designed to accelerate app development on the .NET MAUI platform. With a focus on community-driven innovation, it has become an indispensable tool for developers looking to enhance their .NET MAUI applications. The year that was Our GitHub repository has evolved into a dynamic hub of activity, engaging over 40 contributors who have collectively ..read more

Visual Studio 2022 saw an abundance of incredible features released in 2023, which gave .NET developers a host of new tools to enhance their productivity. With so many to choose from, I’ve hand-picked a selection that includes editor improvements, productivity updates, and AI assistance. Let’s explore some of the most impactful features that have become integral to my daily development routine. 1. Dev Tunnels Dev Tunnels are a game-changer for developers who need to expose their local development server to the internet. It provides a unique URL that directly tunnels to your local machine. This ..read more

NET Conf 2023 was the largest .NET Conf ever with over 100 sessions from speakers around the globe! We want to give a huge THANK YOU to all who joined us live, asked questions on social media, and participated in our fun and games. This post recaps the exhilarating moments and key takeaways from the event. On-Demand Recordings The conference featured over 80 sessions from various teams and community experts, each brimming with insights on building cross-platform applications with .NET. Explore these sessions at your own pace on the .NET YouTube. Here are our top 5 viewed sessions for .NET ..read more

With the release of .NET 8 we are introducing a new system for generating the C# code used to access Android Resources. The system which generated a Resource.designer.cs file in Xamarin.Android, .NET 6 and .NET 7 has been deprecated. The new system generates a single _Microsoft.Android.Resource.Designer assembly.  This will contain all the final resource classes for every assembly. What are Android Resources? All Android applications will have some sort of user interface resources in them. They often have the user interface layouts in the form of XML file, images and icons in the for ..read more

Today our team is thrilled to introduce you to the latest major stable release of .NET MAUI in .NET 8! 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. 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. In addition to all the amazing work in the .NET ..read more

Are you ready to unleash your creativity and coding skills with .NET 8? Join us for The Great .NET 8 Hack, a virtual hackathon to learn how to build cloud native apps, AI apps or .NET MAUI apps with the latest version of .NET. Whether you’re a beginner, a student, or an expert looking for a new challenge, this is the perfect opportunity for you! .NET 8 is the newest release of the popular open source and cross-platform development platform that powers millions of apps across the web, mobile, desktop, gaming, IoT, and more. With .NET 8, you can take advantage of the latest features and improvem ..read more

The major focus for .NET MAUI in the .NET 8 release is quality. As such, alot of our focus has been fixing bugs instead of chasing lofty performance goals. In .NET 8, we merged 1,559 pull requests that closed 596 total issues. These include changes from the .NET MAUI team as well as the .NET MAUI community. We are optimistic that this should result in a significant increase in quality in .NET 8. However! We still have plenty of performance changes to showcase. Building upon the fundamental performance improvements in .NET 8 we discover “low-hanging” fruit constantly, and there were high-voted ..read more