Announcing .NET MAUI in .NET 8 Release Candidate 1: Quality
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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32 comments
So did you finally hire more devs or are you still developing MAUI in 5 people? Tim Corey has perfectly summed up MAUI in his VS for Mac video: “They are more talking about MAUI than working on MAUI”. Rebranded Xamarin with introduced bugs from WinUI 3 breaking with every new update – 1 bug fix and 1 new bug in every new version.
As everyone is saying quality is so bad since the Xamarin times that nobody want to use this MAUI for new projects. In years using MS stack (VB, winforms, wpf, silverlight, asp.net, etc) i havent seen such a bad quality product coming from MS with so many bugs, i dont know what is problem and why havent been solved for years with xamarin but defenetely xamarin/maui doesnt look like a MS product and is not to the standards that a customer would expect from Microsoft.
Blazor in the other side works great, maybe you should focus on MAUI+Blazor side and be part of the Blazor team.
A great UI designer like WPF/Winforms designer would be nice to have too for many to start exploring the framework. we have been used to these designers since VB/winforms/wpf.
Guys, MAUI is a disaster.
I left for Flutter and got my life back.
How about bug #15216 ?
David, I do not envy your position atm. Clearly the level of confidence in MAUI is extremely low at the moment and the MAUI team (as well as the VS team and Microsoft in general) is not doing it any favors with constant releases that introduce a new issue for every other issue they fix or feature they add.
We, like many others, are trying to use MAUI to create a mobile app with a single code base that can target Android and iOS, as part of broader product. As a LOB product all we want is a stable platform, that performs reasonably, with a good development experience for these two main targets.
As others have said, you need resources from Microsoft, a serious push not just for first level testing (internal within the team) and by the broader community, but by internal usage of the product by other Microsoft teams. Only the internal pain of usage the platform to develop applications will highlight its state and create the force (and provide the resources) to get it to a stable and usable state.
I understand the deadlines and the need to release in line with the other .NET components, but someone needs to have the clear head to say it’s not ready and demand more resources to make it ready.
We’re all here eagerly waiting for a stable version that we can rely upon and all jump on the bandwagon. Don’t get me wrong: the premises of the product is great, what you have achieved so far is good but you are risking it all disappear if you keep down this path.
Best of luck and we look forward to future releases.
To give developers enough confidence to use it, Microsoft need create a famous application with MAUI for different platforms.
Running Visual Studio 2022 Preview 17.8.0 Preview 2.0
We are getting an error while building our MAUI Android/iOS app:
XA8000
Could not find Android Resource ‘@layout/camerafragment’. Please update @(AndroidResource) to add the missing resource.
C:\Program Files\dotnet\packs\Microsoft.Android.Sdk.Windows\34.0.0-rc.1.432\tools\Xamarin.Android.Common.targets 1458
Any guidance on this? We would love to update to .Net 8, but are blocked with this issue.
With help from the amazing Jonathan Peppers, we learned that this error is caused by having the following nugets in the soln. We didn’t need them anymore.
Xamarin.CommunityToolkit.MauiCompat
Xamarin.CommunityToolkit.Markup.MauiCompat
Why Kotlin Multiplatforms can, while MAUI cannot?
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html#kotlin-multiplatform-use-cases
Progress indeed, but alas I’m still blocked by a number of issues, the worst of which is the inability to use a SwipeView within a CollectionView on Windows, ruling out its use in any cross-platform application. The initial attempt at a fix was a rewrite which seems to have been completed then rejected in favor of using the native control, after that, no apparent progress. That means it joins another dozen or so bugs I have outstanding from .NET 6, some are minor nits, but others, like this one (my version of it was #9243) are extremely difficult to code around, since their very presence in XAML causes run time crashes so you have to have distinct pages for Android and Windows.
Having made a good faith effort to reproduce and report problems I’m disappointed by just how many are still outstanding after a year, still, I get priorities. From my perspective if there was just a way to make this one problem not cause a crash, I’d be way ahead, the rest I could code around if I had to.