Announcing .NET MAUI in .NET 8 Release Candidate 2: More Quality

David Ortinau

October 10th, 202338 10

Today, we take one step closer to .NET 8 general availability (GA) by shipping .NET MAUI in .NET 8 release candidate 2 (RC2). As with RC1, this release is covered by a go-live license so you can receive support when using it in your production applications. In this release we have focused on issues that regressed throughout the previews, and regaining some performance that was lost as we improved the reliability of hot reload, visual state manager, bindings, and app themes.

Quality Improvements

In addition to our narrowed focus on regressions we have also increased the battery of manual tests and automated testing. There are no breaking API changes between .NET 7 and .NET 8, so you can expect the upgrade for your applications to go smoothly in that respect. For more information about upgrading from 7 to 8, follow this simple guide.

Highlights from this release:

Performance Improvements: Several performance improvements were made, including enhancements to the performance of ActivityExtensions.GetWindowFrame on Android, and “Setter Specificity” performance. These optimizations contribute to smoother app performance. (#17241, #17364, #17230, #17505, #17545).

UI and Control Fixes: Several fixes and updates were made to controls and UI elements, including fixes related to CollectionView, TabBar visibility, RoundRectangle Borders, and Android text alignment. With these your app UI is more consistent and visually accurate across platforms. (#16870, #17240, #17261, #17353, #17430, #17594), #17567).

Platform-Specific Fixes: Several platform-specific fixes were made, including drag-and-drop functionality, tab bar appearance, and specific platform behaviors, ensuring a consistent user experience across platforms. (#15748, #16561, #17495, #17041, #17358.

The release also includes numerous other bug fixes, enhancements, and contributions. Check out the full release notes for more details.

Additional information:

Bonus: .NET 7 Service Release

Today we have also shipped .NET MAUI service release 8 (version 7.0.96) for .NET 7 including select high-priority fixes for layout, memory leaks, CollectionView, safe area, and more. You can use this service release by installing .NET 8 RC2 using one of the methods below and continuing to build your applications to target .NET 7.

Alternatively, you can acquire 7.0.96 by upgrading to Visual Studio 17.7.5.

Bonus 2: Xcode 15 and Android API 34

Xamarin developers can now use Xcode 15 to target the latest versions (e.g iOS 17, iPadOS 17), and target Android API 34 in order to be compliant with store policies. To do this, install Visual Studio 17.8 Preview 3 or the latest stable version of Visual Studio for Mac and configure your environment as usual. This does not provide newer platform APIs, but does enable existing projects to continue building while you complete your upgrades to .NET 8 and .NET MAUI regardless of the Xamarin end-of-support date next year.

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 RC2 installer, and then install .NET MAUI from the command line:

dotnet workload install maui

Through the retirement of Visual Studio for Mac next year 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 3 to get .NET 8 RC2 with .NET MAUI (and 7.0.96).

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 to all 23 contributors (and bots) who helped put this release together!

Thank you for your support and happy coding!

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

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38 comments

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  • Varun Ravindranath 1

    Happy to see the new RC2.
    Sadly, The experience with MAUI platform has not been fruitful and it has been too much frustrating to see the must fixes been dropped out the one of the major releases. The good thing under the Xamarin Core team was they were very much focused on the original idea of running/developing apps in linux or mac with less pain and effort. Now the core thing for the current team is to produce more headaches to make life difficult for migration or sustain the efforts. Clients are very hestiant and doubting to invest in the platform as it is unstable and time and effort speaks for itself.
    Developing UI with collection view will cost you a memory leak that will be solved in NET 8 -> You better tell us what is possible to be done in this platform. Even having the boost that Xamarin gave currently most of the people hate MAUI not because its not popular due to bugs and improvements but the time and cost effective nature of the product dev. Nobody has time to wait to next major release to address around 1000 plus issue hoping it will not produce another 3000 unresolved.
    The thing I would have suggested is to sustain Xamarin dev and support till you have a stable MAUI Framework – I believe now that it will again take a NET 9/NET 10 to come out to atleast reach a Xamarin level of efforts less dev and test. Most of the team is asking to move out of the platform and start dev-ing in Flutter or more stable hybrid env. Xamarin gave a good experience But MAUI made that it so bad that people regret using MAUI.
    Finally, I just want to conclude by saying that Kudos to team who hardworked to make it possible.

    —–Sadly No words will be equal or replace the experience till now…

    I know the reviews will never change anything- but sake of saying we all tried —
    just like the WindowsPhone we all know now where is it and CEO regret does tell it all. Hope MAUI is not leading us there.

  • John Hawke 0

    Hi there! Is there a timeline for when Linux support might arrive?

  • Balasubramanian Ramanathan 0

    Thanks to microsoft for adding support for xcode15 and ios17 and mac os 14. When i saw that visual studio for mac is retiring i thought i dont have enough time to migrate xamarin ios projects to .net. but with this we have time until 2025 first quarter ie apple stop supporting ios17.

    Just a question whether visual studio for mac runs ok on mac os 14 sonoma?

    thank you again.

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