Announcing .NET MAUI in .NET 8 Preview 5

David Ortinau

June 13th, 202356 5

Hello everyone! I’m thrilled to announce that .NET MAUI in .NET 8 Preview 5 is now available with lots of bug fixes and performance improvements for cross-platform app development. In this post, I’ll summarize some of the most important changes in this release and show you how to update your .NET MAUI project to use this release.

What’s fixed and improved in .NET MAUI

Preview 5 is another quality-focused update that fixes many issues and enhances the performance of the framework, including:

  • iOS Keyboard Scrolling: ContentInsets were added to improve the scrolling behavior of the iOS keyboard. #14371
  • Test Improvements: Various improvements and fixes were made to the tests, including the removal of the skip attribute from a test related to SearchBarHandler. #14852
  • Performance Enhancements: Performance improvements were made to the {Binding} mechanism and the layout performance of labels on Android. #14830, #14933, #14980
  • Bug Fixes: Several bug fixes were implemented, addressing issues such as gestures in Label Spans, Entry issues with the keyboard, Label truncation on iOS, CollectionView issues, ContentView RTL, and more. #14410, #14382, #14453, #14391, #11763, #15114, #12909

These are just some of the highlights of this release. For a complete list of changes, please check out the release notes.

How to update

Visual Studio 2022 on Windows now includes .NET 8 previews and the .NET MAUI preview workload. Download the latest preview version 17.7 Preview 2, select the .NET Multi-platform App UI workload, and then check the optional component “.NET MAUI (.NET 8 Preview)”.

Visual Studio installer checkbox for .NET MAUI and .NET 8 previews

If you are on macOS, you may download the .NET 8 preview 5 installer, and then install .NET MAUI from the command line:

dotnet workload install maui

To verify that everything is installed correctly, you can run the following command:

dotnet --list-sdks

You should see something like this:

8.0.100-preview.5.23303.2 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk]

And to verify you have the correct .NET MAUI workload, run the command:

dotnet workload list

You should see something like this:

Installed Workload Id      Manifest Version                            Installation Source
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
maui-windows               8.0.0-preview.5.8529/8.0.100-preview.5      VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371
maui-maccatalyst           8.0.0-preview.5.8529/8.0.100-preview.5      VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371
maccatalyst                16.4.8525-net8-p5/8.0.100-preview.5         VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371
maui-ios                   8.0.0-preview.5.8529/8.0.100-preview.5      VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371
ios                        16.4.8525-net8-p5/8.0.100-preview.5         VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371
maui-android               8.0.0-preview.5.8529/8.0.100-preview.5      VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371
android                    34.0.0-preview.5.312/8.0.100-preview.5      VS 17.5.33627.172, VS 17.7.33808.371

Updating existing projects

To update your .NET MAUI project to use 8.0.0-preview.5.8529, you first need to install the .NET 8 Preview 5 SDK and then update the .NET MAUI NuGet packages in your project. You can use Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac to manage your NuGet packages or edit your project file manually.

To use Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac, right-click on your project and select “Manage NuGet Packages…” then select the “Include prerelease” option and search for Microsoft.Maui. packages. Update all the packages to version 8.0.0-preview.5.8529. To edit your project file manually, open it in a text editor and find the ItemGroup element that contains the PackageReference elements for Microsoft.Maui. packages. Update all the Version attributes to 8.0.0-preview.5.8529.

Your project file should have an ItemGroup that looks something like this:

<ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Maui.Controls" Version="$(MauiVersion)" />
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Maui.Controls.Compatibility" Version="$(MauiVersion)" />
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug" Version="8.0.0-preview.5.23280.8" />
</ItemGroup>

Now you can build and run your project using Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac or use the dotnet build command with the -t:Run target:

dotnet build -t:Run -f net8-android MyMauiApp.csproj

This will build and launch your app on an Android emulator or device.

Feedback Welcome

We appreciate your feedback and contributions to .NET MAUI. You can report issues, suggest features, or submit pull requests on our GitHub repository. You can also join our Discord server or follow us on Twitter to stay in touch with the latest news and updates.

Thank you for your support and happy coding!

David Ortinau Principal Product Manager, .NET Multi-platform App UI

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56 comments

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  • Angel Arcoraci 10

    As a software engineer with over 17 years of experience and having suffered through the worst of Xamarin seeing the state of MAUI right now only brings horrible memories. It’s a shame and an embarrassment the current NOT PREVIEW version of MAUI is presented as a viable technology to build enterprise apps.

    The unacceptable state of this tool is so obvious that on the official documentation you can see how the use a FLEX LAYOUT as a child of a Refresh View since using the expected control, the Collection View, is broken.

    I really hope the extend the support for Xamarin because if we are forced to move to MAUI on it’s current lamentable state I, and many developers I assume, will really consider talking to our clients or superiors to get the time and resources to use an alternative.

    My suggestion is you call MAUI a technology preview in general (net7 is absolutely broken) and extend Xamarin support until basic controls like collection view or the ENTRY field works. Yes, 2023 and we cannot get proper tab stop navigation between entries, not to mention the keyboard blocking them and bogus return callbacks.

    • Peny Fast 2

      Amen to that.

  • Philip Njoroge 1

    …so, I have been developing WinForm projects using NET Core and decided to understand what MAUI was all about….then came across these comments! Thank you for the heads up, things are not looking good for MAUI. Might as well explore Web and stick with WinForms a little longer

  • Ezequiel Regaldo 0

    Where is linux support ? 🤔 im worried about this … net core is awesome but maui seems too bad honestly. Full aot ? hmmmmmm

  • Alem Dervisevic 0

    What I’m wondering is: When will MAUI finally get a designer on the drag and drop principle? it would speed up designing and long-term writing of code for ordinary layouts.

  • Niels Cup 0

    I cant get .NET 8 to work on VS mac: I keep getting this error:

    error NETSDK1147: To build this project, the following workloads must be installed: maui-tizen

    1) I don’t want to build for tizen, we only have Android and iOS
    2) I installed tizen via the following command: sudo dotnet workload install maui-tizen
    3) if I run dotnet workload list I see maui-tizen is installed: maui-tizen 8.0.0-preview.6.8686/8.0.100-preview.6

    Any ideas?

  • S T. 0

    MAUI in .NET 8 is on the right track. I had enough frustrations using it especially for Android in previous versions. However, I do not understand the opinions of some professionals, who know well that once the fundamental issues are solved, then everything will be solved by itself. In addition, it is open source. It would be much more useful to make concrete contributions. MAUI is a brilliant platform. Congratulations David!

  • Stephen Winstanley 1

    After struggling with a large project in .Net 7 Maui it is very demoralising to think I now have to wait to .Net 8 release to see what is fixed or still broken. I am beginning to think maybe by .Net 100 Maui may finally be ready.

  • Chris Hu 2

    Dear MS, iOS 17 is coming out in September and Xamarin app won’t run on iOS 17. We are forced to migrate our Xamarin app to MAUI. Given the current state of .NET 7 MAUI with massive memory leaks and critical UI bugs, it is fair to say it is not production ready! I am ware many bugs are fixed in .NET 8 preview, and .NET 8 will not be release before iOS 17 release this September! And Xamarin app cannot run on iOS 17. What should Xamarin/Maui developers do? MS must address this issue NOW! Not kicking the can down the road! MS can either extent Xamarin support on iOS 17 or backport all the critical bug fixes to .NET 7.

  • Adam Thompson 0

    We made the decision to go Blazor Hybrid with .NET MAUI. All the pages are Razor pages running in a single BlazorWebView control on a single xaml page.

    We have not had any issues with html/css/javascript/blazor. We have not had any problems running MudBlazor controls. We run the same razor pages on a asp.net core site without major issues.

    If they could fix the time it takes to run the app when hitting F5, I would not have any complaints. Sometimes it can run in under 30 seconds and then other times it has to rebuild everything taking up to 5 minutes.

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