>> [MUSIC]. >> Welcome back to another.Net
MAUI Beginner Series Video. I'm James Montemagno, a Product Manager on the Developer Community
Team here at Microsoft. Today we're continuing our journey, learning how to build beautiful
native cross-platform desktop and mobile
apps with.Net MAUI. Now, so far we've done a
lot in our application. We've learned about what
is in a file new project. We started to build a
user interface in XAML. We added data binding in an
MVVM architecture pattern, and we even did some navigation. Now next up is how to
access Native API features. Now when we think about native APIs, things that are on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows, these are things
that are platform specific. Now you can access
these directly inside of C# thanks to the
underlying systems of iOS and Android for.Net
and Windows App SDK and UI3. Now what's great about.Net MAUI
is that the team abstracted a whole bunch of common platform
APIs into a single API, for you to use it as a developer. This means when you
want to go access common things such as geolocation, sensors or connectivity, you don't have to learn a
bunch of different APIs. There's a single API
that you can use. Similar to the user interface, that abstracted common user interface
controls into a single API, that's what these APIs do as well. Now what we're going to do is go
back to our application and learn how to integrate connectivity
into our application, which is a very common feature in
nearly every single application. Let's head over there
now. In this.Net MAUI Beginner Series we've been
building the My Task application. It's a simple task application that allows us to add different tasks, also allows us to swipe to delete, or tap on one and navigate
to get details and go back. All with the XAML user interface, data binding and the built
in navigation system. The last thing we want to do is add some platform capabilities here. Now it would be pretty
awesome to not allow people to add new tasks or synchronize them unless they have
Internet connectivity, with.Net MAUI it's super simple
to do that with the built in APIs that abstracts the
underlying APIs of the platform. Let's go ahead and
do that. Here again, we have all of our application
that we've been building out. I haven't added anything to it, so if you're following
along at home, you can just start
coding along with me. Of course you can find
a full final version of the app in the show notes. Here we have a main page
and what we can see up top here is that we
have a simple grid, an image, an entry, and this button called Add Command. Below we have a CollectionView, we have SwipeViews and we have our view models here
using full MVVM. Now, if we want to get
access specifically to different services
or different APIs, there's tons that are built
into.Net MAUI itself. For example, let's say we go
up to the Add Command here. What we maybe you want to be able
to do is check Internet here. So I can come in and
say, Microsoft.Maui. Inside of here there are a bunch of different namespaces such
as application model, which would give me access to
different things like app actions, app info, launching the browser. Here's communication, for example, which would give me
access to contacts, e-mails, phone dialers, whole bunch of things. There's also additional
ones that we can see inside of here,
like authentication. We of course have built
in controls, devices. There's all things
that are inside of here that you can get
access to directly. Now, the one that we need access
to is going to be connectivity. When I type in connectivity, we can see it's in
Microsoft.Maui.Networking.Connectivity. Now associated with the connectivity
is also an interface too. I could come in and just check the current access state here so I can say what is
the current network access? But if you're like me and you want your view models
to be testable, you could be able to
past it a interface. Let's go ahead and set that up. I'm going to say IConnectivity. Here we go. Then what I'm going
to do is simply fill this in. Of course, Visual Studio writes all the code for
me, which is spectacular. Then what I'm able to do
here is say if connectivity. and I'm going to say
network access does not equal network access of Internet or then I don't have
Internet and I'm going to return. What I can then do is
say, await in here. We've gone ahead and modified
this to say asynchronous, and we'll modify this to a task. I'm going to say
Shell.Current.DisplayAlert and I'll say no Internet and say okay. Just with one line of code, I'm accessing the network access to see if I have Internet access or not and allowing me to add that
new item into the list or not. If I don't, I'll pop up a message. Now, we need to register that connectivity service
with the main application, and we can do that
in the MAUI program. I'm going to do up top and say
Builder.Services.AddSingleton, and I'm going to say IConnectivity, and then what I can
do is I can pass it, the Connectivity.Current as what to use when it registers and
resolves the IConnectivity. Now, I'm going to go ahead and
show this on Android here, but it works on obviously all
operating systems. There we go. What's great about the Android
emulator is that I can flip on and off Internet here very easily. This is best done in non debug mode because the debugger does rely on some of the underlying
network connectivity to actually debug your application. But here's my application
running and I should be able to add Apples in there. There we go. Now if I go in and actually
toggle on, for example, "Airplane Mode" that's going to
toggle off the Internet and I'm going to go ahead and say Oranges and I'm going to add
it's going to say, "Uh-Oh, No Internet." Just like that, we're
using native APIs, but completely cross-platform
in the same exact code that we have inside of our main view
model to check Internet access. It's going to work 100
percent across iOS, Android, Mac OS and Windows. The last thing I want to
do is head over to my Mac. We spent a lot of time inside of
Visual Studio 2022 on Windows, but I took the same exact My Task application and I
loaded them up on the Mac. You can go ahead and run
your applications from Visual Studio 2022 from Mac
or from the command line. Here we have the Mac and
iOS versions of the app. Here you can add items, you get swipe to delete, you can tap and navigate
and just like that, we have our full applications
ready to go on both Mac, iOS and, of course,
Android and Windows. There you've done it.
You've integrated some platform specific APIs, 100 percent cross-platform,
thanks to.Net MAUI. Now we're going to continue
our journey in the.Net MAUI Beginner Series
by taking a look at all of the other
things that you need to know and resources to continue
your learning journey. Stay tuned for more in
the.Net MAUI Beginner Series.
