Today, I'm going to try to answer the question that a lot of you have
been asking me, which is, should I learn Xamarin development in 2021?
Or should I wait for dotnet Maui?
That's going to release in November.
Today.
I'm going to break down.
What is Donnette, Maui?
How does it relate to Xamarin forms and the Xamarin and the
platforms underneath the hood?
And should you wait, or should you get started with mobile development today?
So tune in.
Hi everyone.
I'm James Monson Magno, and I've been putting out awesome Xamarin content for
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All right.
Well, I love it to answer questions and make videos like this because
I don't have to worry about coding.
I can just kind of talk to you directly.
I got some great questions.
Um, this happens.
All the time where there's new announcements around
a new piece of technology.
Um, and it's always, should I wait to like, start with that thing?
Should I start today with the current thing?
How does it evolve?
How does it, you know, how am I going to upgrade?
Can I upgrade?
Uh, and the real question comes around at Maui and Xamarin forms today.
What should you do?
And pothole here ass.
Right here as says, hello, sir, I'm new to software development and to
C sharp, and I want to learn C sharp for mobile and desktop development.
I like that.
Um, I just found out about Donna and Maui as part of done at five and done at six.
And my question is, should I learn Xamarin in 2021?
And will Xamarin be support or not after.net Maui?
Well, first let's break down a few pieces of technology.
Okay.
So you're right.
You have done at five and Don at six.
So don@fiveisthenextversionof.net core.
So you had.net framework.net core, and then just.net sort of simplified it.
Unification of.net across the board unified project, stricture tooling, all
the good stuff that you would imagine.
Now that release came out last November, 2021, or sorry, 2020.
And this year 2021 will be the release of.net six, which is the first LTS
release of this next generation of.net.
So LTS has long-term support.
So every two years you'll get an LTS release.
And then in between you'll get a current release and this is familiar to how like
node JS and other sort of runtimes work, um, usually in the cadence, but every
November new version of.net all up.
Now with Don at five Xamarin and Xamarin forms, didn't make that jump.
They're still on their same runtime infrastructure, project structure.
And that is because the next evolution with dotnet six is going to
introduce a new cross platform, user interface, framework, and platform
for developers to create desktop and mobile apps, which is called.net Maui.
But remember, Dot net is the core runtime Xamarin, which
was where pumping I worked at.
And the product I continue to work on to this day, Xamarin is sort of just
the base infrastructure that let's see sharpen.net run on iOS and Android devices
and all the tooling and compilation Xamarin forms with the majority of.
Developers use when they're building was Samran Xamarin forms as a cross-platform
user interface library has all of your dependency services and it has access to
all the UI, um, to everything that you need now with done at Maui, though, if
we really pull up, what does it mean?
Well, it's technically really this evolution of Xamarin forms right now.
It is sort of.
What is Amarin what is Xamarin forms?
How are they related?
Well, Xamarin under the hood is the technology that powers Amerind forums.
The Xamarin forms is probably where you're going to live in 99% of the time.
So to really just streamline this, Don at Maui is the evolution
as the cross-platform native UI stack to build mobile and desktop.
Um, scenarios with UI controls that have been built from the ground up
for performance and extensibility.
It's actually a lot more than that.
This is just sort of the high-level definition slide that
you often see when you're looking at Don and Maui presentations.
And when you go.
And you talk to the team about, well, what's their focus.
This is what the put on the board.
These four goals, Bubba quality, performance, design, and platforms.
I would also add a fifth one in here too, which is tooling, which I'll talk about.
And I think that's super duper important.
But with Donna and Maui, it is again, the evolution of Xamarin forms, which
means that it's going to have the months upon months of quality Xamarin forms
or leases on top of Xamarin forms, five, which is a spectacular release.
And it'll have all that core infrastructure there.
But the team is sort of peeling back the layers on Xamarin forms
and they're rebuilding how the tools and the UI are architected
for performance and extensibility.
So they want super fast startup time, super responsive UI, smooth animations,
and reduced, uh, view nesting.
So that'll peel back the layers of the UI and simplify that down.
Now with that also comes the ability to, um, optimize the design and
customizes the design per platform.
And I'll kind of show you what this means in some of the slides here
that I've seen in a lot of, kind of dinette, Maui presentations.
The idea is that today with Xamarin forms, things are all renderer
base and you have to extend renders and add more layers onto them.
And there's some complexity there.
And again, Xamarin forms have been around for six, seven years at this point.
So, you know, like anything, it grows and flourishes, but with this.
The key on design is extensibility.
So you can easily add in fluent design material, design, Cupertino design, or
just your own custom design, anything that you want and really make it extensible.
If you want to self draw, all your controls, go for it.
Right.
It's all built in.
Then the platforms are going to be Android, iOS, Mac OS, and windows.
Windows will be powered by when you, I three, which is the sort of.
Latest and greatest generation of UI development for windows 10 development.
And then Macko OS, and this is actually really cool because the macro S we'll
go through project catalyst, which means that it'll be really, really
easy to test because it's your iOS app bundled up into catalyst awesomeness.
And this is I'm super excited for this because any iOS application will
soon just boom, or right on a Mac.
If you're building it was Xamarin.
Xamarin forms or, and Maui.
Now let's talk about that quality and performance, right?
So quality Xamarin forms has grown evolved, and sort of, there's just been
months now since Xamarin forms, five came out in which they're fine tuning the,
um, every single piece of that toolkit.
So you get all of that goodness with Don and Maui.
But also you're gonna have this rearchitecturing here.
And previously was Amerind forms.
There was kind of this tightly coupled onus of how the renders worked, but
in the new implementation with Don and Maui, everything is an interface.
So down at Maui will be imple to implement their own button, for example, but you
might have fabulous, which is an F sharp UI framework on top of Xamarin forms.
Have a fabulous button or react native or sorry, reactive UI button.
Or a comment button or anything else that you want a ski, a button, and you can have
all of these implemented really easily.
And they're portable.
They're usable.
They're also extensible very easily compared to the render architecture
and they're way more performance.
So I think that's super important now.
As we talk about this, right?
Here's some reasons why you may want.net Maui in your life.
Um, and it's set to release with Donna at six, November, 2021.
So it's sort of like that, and they'll be previous ahead of time,
but, you know, Where does this go?
And where does this fit into the Xamarin forms story?
Well, since it's the evolution, you're going to get all the things
that you know, and love today.
Right.
And, um, you'll be able to upgrade seamlessly.
So to the question that was asked earlier, should I learn.
All this stuff about Xamarin or wait for Don Maui.
The answer is you should never wait.
You should always start implementing and coding and learning today.
Since Donna Maui and Xamarin forms are all built with C sharp
and.net, you know, that means that anything that is not the UI layer.
So all of your models, your view models, your services, your databases.
Everything that have basically shown you in my Xamarin one-on-one
series is going to apply.
There's still going to be a shell concept.
They're still going to be navigation used to be able to make database
calls or rest service calls.
Um, all the things that I've shown you are all going to apply to dotnet Maui.
So that's, what's really, really cool, you know, in fact, The reason I became
a Xamarin developer is because all the work I was doing on my desktop
wind forms and WPF apps all came over into Xamarin and Xamarin forms,
like all that, you know, logic, that business logic layer, I all knew.
I knew all that stuff.
So you'll be good to go there.
Now the things that'll change of course are bits and pieces of the UI.
So there are, um, rearchitecting of the controls, but that doesn't mean
that the controls are going away.
In fact, basically all of the controls are coming over.
They're being rearchitected from the ground up.
Now, there are going to be some changes to properties and to namespaces, but there
is going to be a try convert tool that you can go ahead and run on the command line
and convert your Xamarin forms app into.
A dotnet Maui app when you're ready.
And additionally, you'll have plenty of time because Xamarin forms itself will
be supported until November of 2022.
So if you're start today, you have a year and a half support to go.
All right.
Now I'd like to say this because if I was to wait to build my
applications, Well, I wouldn't have released my applications yet.
I literally started my cadence and island tracker previously and
had I had waited for Donna Maui.
I would not be making money off of them and people wouldn't be using them.
And, um, they're all ready and they're good to go.
And they run great today.
So to me, it's like, Hey, you know, eventually I have to pay, catch up where,
you know, my apps, you know, may at some point needs some new features that I need
to migrate to it on Maui or Xamarin forms.
And the stuff that I have today may just work really great going into the future.
But either way you look at it, you should start learning and coding C sharp.net.
Take a look at Xamarin forms today.
Cause all of that stuff is going to apply all of the controls, all
your logic, all of your database stuff, all that stuff is there.
But.
When you are ready to upgrade, you'll get some really cool things
because first and foremost, hot reload and C-sharp hot reload will
be built directly into Don and Maui.
It's already there.
XAML hot.
Reload is already there for Xamarin forms.
That's all their hot restart for debugging to iOS, without a Mac.
That'll be there too.
You get all that great tooling built right in, but Donna
will have something very cool.
And this is where some of that try convert stuff of work, which is a single simple.
Unified project for building cross-platform mobile applications.
And this is a really cool slide because it shows the multi
targeting facet of dotnet Maui.
So instead of having like four or five different projects and a shared
code library, you have the ability now to put everything in one project.
So here's this called my app, but more importantly, on the bottom here.
What you see is that you can put all of your fonts, images,
resources, and on the bottom, right?
You can actually add your platform specific code inside of there
and do conditional compilation, which is really, really cool.
And on the top, right.
You'll notice that you can actually debug to multiple iOS, Android, or windows.
Devices directly from a single project, you have to set different things that
up, you just say, go to iOS or go to Android and boom, you're good to go.
So you're going to get this unification that's there.
Now there's no, there's a lot of things happening in the Don Moe world.
So for example, the last update, which was just a week ago, I'm
on the dinette community standup.
So there's a whole bunch of awesome things happening.
So this is the March 4th status update.
You're going to get new.
Namespaces a bunch of controls have been completely updated.
The catalyst support is tested and getting runny running.
When you, I, three is running there with projections for Donna six, that single
project stuff I just showed you is good to go and all sorts of good stuff.
And what's cool is that you can go over to the.net Maui.
Get hub today and take a look at everything.
So here you can look at all the work that's going on here.
Let me go and zoom in a little bit too.
So here you go.
You can see everything that's going on.
You can see the solution, how to build it, the tools that
you'll need anything like this.
Here's the current news, the latest updates that I talked about, and you
can see all the additional live streams, anything that has been kind of been
given on Don and Maui, here's all the updates, the specs, the roadmap.
Um, and here's a cool comparison.
What I'd like to say is between Xamarin forms and Don and Maui.
So you can see what's supported.
What's not right.
Officially from Microsoft will be Mac iOS windows for, um, when you, I
three and of course, iOS and Android.
I also love that they kind of break down the, uh, app architecture models,
because one thing that's really, really cool is that they're actually going to
start to introduce an MVQ and blazers slash razor com compilation, like, you
know, combination inside this thing.
So there's a whole lot going on here.
You can see a lot of things like yes, by default.
Yes.
By default, lotta.
A lot of these old things that were sort of built and added on
into the, into the.net and to the Xamarin forms, ethos, right.
Is going to evolve into.net Maui.
But that doesn't mean that your experience today is gonna, you know, um, not be
awesome, cause it will be awesome.
Everything that you've seen in all my videos.
So the hot reload, the hot restart, um, all the new adornments, all their code.
Refactorings being able to build beautiful applications.
Like I've been building my Twitch stream and cloning the Peloton application.
It's all there for you.
So long story short in this video, should you start to learn
Xamarin and Xamarin forms today?
Or should you wait for a Maui?
Yes.
You should start learning today.
Xamarin and Xamarin forms.
And C-sharp for cross-platform development, because really when you
go to Don and Maui, you'll be able to try convert, upgrade your project and
everything that you already know about the UI about MVVM about all that good
stuff is going to apply, but you'll just get a whole bunch of awesome enhancements
and you can start coding today.
And not in eight or nine months, just go for it, go all
in and start your development.
Because all of that stuff that you learn along the way is all gonna apply.
It's been applying to my mobile applications for
the last decade and beyond.
So I can tell you with confidence today that that's the route I would go.
Anyways, I just wanted to break it down.
Sit down with everyone today.
Give you my spin on it.
Give you a little update.
What's going on in the Don and Maui world.
Hope you really liked this video.
Please leave comments below down there.
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