Learn Xamarin Today or Wait for .NET MAUI?

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 net maui that's going to release in november today i'm going to break down what is done at maui how does it relate to xamarin forms and the xamarin platforms underneath the hood and should you wait or should you get started with mobile development today so tune in [Music] hey everyone i'm james montemagno and i've been putting out awesome xamarin content for you right here on my youtube channel i've been also answering a lot of your questions you've been leaving in the comments and building out my xamarin 101 series if you're new to the channel definitely check it out over there break down everything you need to get started and of course answer your questions also if you like the channel don't forget to hit that subscribe button and ding that notification bell and heck if you like this video hit that thumbs up that'll go into the google algorithm of goodness and share it with the world all right well i love 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 and this happens all the time when there's new announcements around a new piece of technology 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 and the real question comes around dotnet maui and xamarin forms today what should you do and pahul here asks right here i 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.net maui as part of dotnet5 and don at six and my question is should i learn xamarin in 2021 and will xamarin be supported or not after dot net maui well first let's break down a few pieces of technology okay so you're right you have done five and dot net six so done at five was the next version of net core so you had net framework.net core and then just.net sort of simplified it unificationof.net across the board unified project structure 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 dot net six which is the first lts release of this next generation of dot net so lts is 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 run times work usually in the cadence but every november new version of net all up now with dot net five xamarin and xamarin forms didn't make that jump they're still in their same runtime infrastructure project structure and that is because the next evolution with net 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 net is the core run time xamarin which was where company i worked at and the product i continue to work on to this day xamarin is sort of just the base infrastructure that lets csharpen.net run on ios and android devices and all the tooling and compilation xamarin forms is what the majority of developers use when they're building with xamarin xamarin.forms as a cross-platform user interface library has all of your dependencies services in it has access to all the ui to everything that you need now with dot net 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 xamarin what is xamarin forms how are they related well xamarin under the hood is the technology that powers xamarin forms with xamarin forms is probably where you're going to live in 99 of the time so to really just streamline this dotnet maui is the evolution as the cross platform native ui stack to build mobile and desktop 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 dot net maui presentations and when you go and you talk to the team about well what's their focus this is what they'll put on the board these four goals 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 don 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 releases 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 view nesting so that'll peel back the layers of the ui and simplify that down now with that also comes the ability to 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.net maui presentations but the idea is that today with xamarin forms things are all renderer based and you have to extend renders and add more layers onto them and there's some complexity there and again xamarin form has been wrong 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 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 win ui 3 which is the sort of latest and greatest generation of ui development for windows 10 development and then mac os and this is actually really cool because the mac os will 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 work right on a mac if you're building it with xamarin xamarin.forms or dotnet 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 can get all of that goodness with dotnet maui but also you're gonna have this re-architecturing here and previously with xamarin forms there was kind of this tightly coupledness of how the renderers 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 skia button and you can have all of these implemented really easily and they're portable they're reusable they're also extensible very easily compared to the render architecture and they're way more performant so i think that's super important now as we talk about this right here are some reasons why you may want net maui in your life and it's set to release with don at 6 november 2021 so it's sort of like that and they'll be previews ahead of time but you know where is this go and where does this fit into the xamarin form story well since it's the evolution you're going to get all the things that you know and love today right and you'll be able to upgrade seamlessly so to the question that was asked earlier should i learn all the 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 don and 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 i've basically shown you in my xamarin 101 series is going to apply there's still going to be a shell concept there's still going to be navigation you should be able to make database calls or rest service calls all the things that i've shown you are all going to apply to net mahoe 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 winforms 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 will change of course are bits and pieces of the ui so there are re-architecting 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 re-architected from the ground up now there are going to be some changes to properties and to name spaces 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 netmaui app when you're ready and additionally you have plenty of time because xamarin.forms itself will be supported until november of 2022 so if you start today you have a year and a half support to go all right now i 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'd waited for donna maui i would not be making money off of them people wouldn't be using them and 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 need some new features that i need to migrate to donna 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 encoding csharp.net take a look at xamarin.forms today because 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 there hot restart for debugging to ios without a mac that'll be there too you get all that great tooling built right in but dynamo will have something very cool and this is where some of that tri-convert stuff will 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 net 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 what's called my app but more importantly on the bottom here what you see is that you can put all of your fonts images or 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 want to set different things as startup 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 additionally there's a lot of things happening in the dotnet maui world so for example the last update which was just a week ago on the.net community stand up so there's a whole bunch of awesome things happening so this is the march 4th status update you're going to get new name spaces a bunch of controls have been completely updated the catalyst support is tested and getting runny running win ui 3 is running there with projections for dot net 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 dotnet maui github 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 maui here's all the updates the specs the road map and here's a cool comparison what i 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 os windows for win ui 3 and of course ios and android i also love that they kind of break down the app architecture models because one thing that's really really cool is that they're actually going to start to introduce an mvu and blazer slash razer 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 a lot of a lot of these old things that were sort of built and added on into the into the net into the xamarin forms ethos right is going to evolve into dotnet maui but that doesn't mean that your experience today is gonna you know not be awesome because it will be awesome everything that you've seen in all my videos so the hot reload the hot restart all the new adornments all the code refactorings being able to build beautiful applications like i've been building on 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 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 mvbm 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 going to 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 the.net maui world hope you really like this video please leave comments below down there i'll try to answer as many as i can and don't forget if you did enjoy this video give it a thumbs up like i said it goes into the google algorithm of joy and happiness to recommend this youtube video off to other people in the world don't forget to subscribe hit that notification bell so you get notified of every release of new videos here on the channel and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: James Montemagno

Views: 48,005

Keywords: xamarin, xamarin forms, xamairn.forms, .net maui, maui, cross-platform, .net, ios, android, uwp, macos, catalyst, dotnet maui

Id: zvPPz6DABi8

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021