Announcing .NET MAUI in .NET 8 Release Candidate 1: Quality
David Ortinau
Today, we are very excited to announce the availability of .NET MAUI in .NET 8 release candidate 1 which comes with a go live license so you can confidently use this release for your production applications. The dominant theme of our .NET MAUI work in .NET 8 is code quality. This release also introduces the first steps to Xcode 15 beta support for Apple SDKs.
Quality Improvements
37 developers contributed to this release, and we thank you all for your hard work including first-time contributors cat0363, Salar K, Mausam Shrestha, Diana Soltani, Emanuel Fernandez Dell’Oca, and John Hollander.
Highlights from this release:
Memory Leak Resolutions: Several memory leak issues were addressed in various UI controls on the iOS platform. These fixes ensure improved memory management and application stability. Specifically, fixes were made for memory leaks in the Editor, Entry, MauiDoneAccessoryView, RefreshView, SwipeView, TimePicker, Picker, and GraphicsView. (#16348, #16349, #16380, #16384, #16532, #16589, #16265, #16605, #16614, #16685).
UI Control Enhancements: Various UI control issues were addressed, including CheckBox, RefreshView, SwipeItem, Label, and Button on multiple platforms. These enhancements contribute to a smoother app interaction. (#16376, #16384, #15883, #16387, #16410, #16458, #16385, #16532, #16589, #16605, #16265).
Platform-Specific Fixes: Platform-specific issues on various platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, were addressed. These fixes ensure a consistent user experience across different platforms, addressing issues like Border clipping, window glitches, and image loading problems. (#14403, #15832, #14861, #16637, #16593, #16762, #16644, #16678, #16700, #16800, #16560, #16752, #16833, #16853, #16162, #16758, #16633, #16798, #16762, #16678).
Performance Optimization: Performance enhancements were made to improve memory usage and resource generation. These optimizations contribute to smoother app performance and responsiveness. Notable optimizations include improved memory usage of CollectionView, resource generation control, and Android timer issues. (#16990, #16838, #16941, #16762, #16963, #16845, #16741, #16644, #17062).
Additional information:
Xcode 15 Support
You can now use Xcode 15 betas as your installation for building apps and managing simulators, and this will be available in the next releases of Visual Studio. In the next release of .NET 8 we will begin to introduce new APIs for Apple SDKs like iOS 17. We have verified this with Xcode 15 Beta 6, though newer releases may work the same.
How to update
On all platforms you can develop with .NET MAUI using Visual Studio Code. Install the .NET MAUI extension and let us know how we can improve this preview experience for you in the future.
Download the .NET 8 RC1 installer, and then install .NET MAUI from the command line:
dotnet workload install mauiThrough the retirement of Visual Studio for Mac you can continue developing using Visual Studio for Mac after enabling the preview feature for .NET 8 in Preferences.
On Windows, update or install Visual Studio 2022 17.8 preview 2 to get .NET 8 RC1 with .NET MAUI.
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 for help with contributing.
Thank you for your support and happy coding!
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30 comments
Hi! I’m really eager to give the RC1 a try but now blocked by VS 2022 Preview 2.0 not being available. Any approximation on when the new version will be out?
Should be very soon. Best to watch the VS updater and/or blog for info.
How’s about referencing the NuGet package directly?
Microsoft.Maui.Controls
Gee David, you really liked to throw out issue numbers in that blog post like there’s no tomorrow, didn’t you?
Good thing there’s no metric tracking how many new issues were introduced between releases, isn’t it? Or your numbers might pale in comparison.
I can’t possibly best you in that department so a few issue numbers will have to suffice:
17208 – That one is fresh off the press. Crashing bug on iOS in CollectionView, introduced in RC1. Wonderful! When I upgraded to RC1 I was expecting a boring morning, but thanks for keeping me on the edge!
17330 – This one affects Windows for a change. Miraculously there’s even a workaround mentioned in the comments to skip certificate checks. I guess if you use MAUI you’re not too botherd by stability anyway…
14931 – That one is by far my favourite! That bug was fixed in one of the .Net 7 SRs and later broken again in .Net 8 😀 Priceless! Crushed any hope I had for using the Shell.TitleView in .Net 8 on iOS.
10186 – I thought about using ToobarItems instead of TitleView (See #14931), but you have that covered already! I need to be able to change my icons in the title. Fortunately the MAUI teams has seen that coming and disabled that ability! 🙂
You see, I’m not as great a PM as you, since I could only come up with 4 issues. But mine are much older, one of them dating back to 2022 🙂
So yes: Please do tell me more about the great quality in your ‘production ready’ framework.
Please do continue to break your framework in subtle & and not so subtle ways so that I always have to redesign our app between minor updates.
Please do give me more reassurance with your ‘go live license’ for a framework that has been arbitrarily crashing our app in non-reproducible ways since months anyway.
Please do punish me more for ever having chosen Xamarin.Forms anyway. That was the most stupid decision we have ever made and we really need to be punished more for this.
I do look forward to your continued quality.
Helmut,
I’m sorry these issues are hitting you hard and creating so much frustration. Thank you for sharing those issues so I can review them and adjust the priority. If you’d like to have a call and discuss your issues and how we can might be able to better help you, shoot me a message. david.ortinau@microsoft.com
Thanks for the offer but I don’t intend to play a game of never ending bug catchup via email.
The most pressing challenge that MAUI has to conquer is its non-existent quality assurance.
I know that some bugs are Apple’s/Google’s fault, but I can’t count anymore how often we’ve been burned by e.g. crashes/bugs in CollectionView after an update, when the device and the OS version remained the same.
Please use whatever wiggle room you have left and invest it in QA.
That would return way more trust into the framework than a preferential treatment in your inbox.
David, I honestly do not envy you. You’re trying to build this great framework, but since nobody at Microsoft uses it, the only feedback you’re able to get is from the third-party developers you’re marketing MAUI to, instead of getting tons of great feedback from the multitude of .net devs inside Microsoft itself.
MAUI has great potential, I would love to use it for every front-end I build, but MS doesn’t seem to have enough confidence in it to use it themselves which makes me wonder if it’s stable enough for me to use the next time I start a new project. The Office team decided to do a ground-up rewrite of Outlook and makes a big deal of talking about how it’s now all built with one codebase… sounds really like what MAUI is supposed to be delivering… except they decided to build some bundled website instead, and like every other website-bundled-as-an-app, it is horrible.
Are there any teams inside of Microsoft that are building non-toy apps with MAUI? How does MS expect buy-in from 3rd party devs when they’re not using the product themselves? Currently, MAUI seems to be hovering at the same level as any other random open-source project where features get implemented or fixed based on whichever contributor has the time and/or interest to address it, rather than a flagship UI framework built by the world’s biggest software company. And it seems to me that the only way that will improve is if the MAUI team isn’t the only team inside Microsoft that’s using MAUI.
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/11956
TL;DR – data binding is broken since December 2022
it’s astonishing that stuff like this is sooo low on the prio list!
qUaLItY in a release candidate
I see the team is discussing this issue, so thanks for spotlighting it.
Yeah, the near total breakage of data-binding on Windows is an absolute shocker. A simple enough fix for sure, and if it weren’t for some other serious issues highlighted here, I’d think an immediate release of RC2 would be warranted just for this:
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/16787
I think the irony of a release focusing on “quality” isn’t lost on anyone here. MAUI is great when it’s working, and I appreciate how difficult handling the idiosyncrasies of the different platforms must be (a lot of the issues I was having stemmed from WinUI 3 itself). But yeah – bug fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes please!
The change that lead to this catastrophic bug was about performance improvements in collection cells. They just reverted that change which obviously fixes the bug but degrades performance again. All this seems like a bad joke, so much incompetence!
Hi David,
Like many I was eager to try your release candidate and I did and unfortunately it has broken all syncfusion controls ! Now we cannot ship .net 7 because of many issues like keyboard covering an entry – to name one and we cannot ship .net 8 because all syncfusion controls crash with TypeLoader exception. Also the broken the panCardView.
Syncfusion will not release till you are stable and we are left in an horrible position.
People that matter at Microsoft must realise that something must be done and give you the resources you need!
Yes, it’s this issue https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/17265
Apart from those 3rd party controls, is .NET 8 resolving the other issues you have? Please share other blocking issues with me. david.ortinau@microsoft.com
I’ll just say one thing. This has not been fixed as of 2021
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/3559
Please add a reaction and/or comment to note that this issue is impacting you. We account for this when prioritizing issues. The age of an issue isn’t as much of a factor.
What are the future plans for Linux support ??
We , the dotnet using subset of the 25% of global dev community (that use Linux as dev machine) are still waiting to put a button on our screen with dotnet.
Right now its hard to trust MAUI as a serious platform for Mobile Development. Specially with all the crap that MS made with VS for Mac. There’s a lot of things that I don’t like about Flutter, but it is far more consistent and reliable platform, with much more community (and Google) support than MAUI. I’m really sad to say that as a long time Xamarin developer but I simply can’t trust MS for this anymore…
what are some things you don’t like about Flutter other than missing c# features?
@David Why Microsoft could not resolve many bugs and instability in MAUI? why Microsoft does not get some QA in MAUI?
Microsoft is releasing its nth iteration of its web development stack, yet, Microsoft Blogs doesn’t have a proper handling of double submit. How absurd is this?
“qUalITy” 🤡
ITNOA
When publish a great and rich visual designer for MAUI?
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/MAUI-XAML-Designer-and-editor-not-workin/1589956?q=MAUI+Designer