Microsoft announced “.NET MAUI”, successor of Xamarin.Forms

Editorial Staff

May 19, Microsoft announced “.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI)”, a cross-platform UI framework. It will be a part of the upcoming “.NET 6”, which will become a framework that provides a single stack that supports building applications and UI for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) was unveiled on May 19 and 20 when Microsoft held “Microsoft Build” conference online. Being the successor of “Xamarin.Forms” tool kit created by Xamarin, who was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, it is a framework to build applications with cross-platform and native UI.

On top of the fact that MAUI is the improved version of Xamarin.Forms, Microsoft has made efforts to identify and respond to the users’ needs. As a result, they consider MAUI as an “evolution” of Xamarin.Forms, and it will become a part of the upcoming “.NET 6”.  According to Microsoft, .NET 6 is scheduled for a preview release this year in 2020.

.Net MAUI will be available in Visual Studio and Visual Studio. They will continue to support MVVM (Model-View-View-Model), XAML, project system, cross-platform tools, and more. As it allows accessing from a developed application to the native underlying system API, users can easily integrate platform-specific features.

.NET MAUI is planned to be previewed in the latter half of 2020. At this moment, its general availability is scheduled on the same date as the release of .NET 6 in November 2021. GitHub has already put up a project page and have started developing SDK for Android and iOS. It is licensed under the MIT License.

Microsoft has also mentioned the future plans of Xamarin.Forms. The next major release of Xamarin.Fors is to happen in the latter half of 2020, and mirror release will happen every six weeks until .NET 6 becomes GA. Both Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android are to be included in .NET as “.NET for iOS” and “.NET for Android”. Eventually, Xamarin.Forms will migrate to .NET MAUI.

According to Microsoft, Xamarin.Forms developers can avail themselves to the same API and control. They promise to have migration guide ready by the time of the official launch to help users smoothly conduct their migration.

.NET Multi-platform App UI（.NET MAUI）
https://github.com/dotnet/maui