November 22nd, 2022

.NET MAUI is now available in Visual Studio for Mac 17.4

Bilge Zeren Aksu
Product Manager

I am excited to share the news that .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) is now available in Visual Studio for Mac!  .NET MAUI tooling shipped in the 17.4 preview Visual Studio for Mac release in August, and then on November 8th we shipped the general availability of .NET MAUI tooling in the 17.4 stable release.  

This release has also shipped the latest quality and reliability improvements for the .NET MAUI SDK as part of .NET 7. See our Release Notes on GitHub and Visual Studio for Mac Release Notes. 

In Visual Studio for Mac 17.4, you now have access to many of the same .NET MAUI productivity features that are available in Visual Studio (Windows). 

Single Project and Debugging to Android/iOS/Mac Catalyst

With .NET MAUI single project, you don’t need to stress about resource management across platforms! .NET MAUI single project is an abstraction of platform specific development experiences and tools in one single shared project that can target Android, iOS and Mac from your Mac machine. If you have a Windows machine, you can also build the same app for Windows! 

Using multi-targeting and SDK-style project, .NET MAUI allows you to have shared resource files within a single project, a single cross-platform app entry point, as well as a simplified debug target selection for running your .NET MAUI apps.  

With .NET MAUI single project, you have the ease of a single optimized development experience while still having access to all platform specific experiences and APIs across multiple platforms and devices you are targeting.   

Image Screenshot 2022 11 17 at 4 31 39 PM Image Screenshot 2022 11 17 at 5 20 04 PM

XAML Hot Reload and Live Visual Tree 

Our visual design tools are optimized to improve your productivity while building your UI. With XAML Hot Reload, you can see the UI changes real time in your running app as you make changes to you XAML. That means you won’t need to build and deploy your app every time to validate UI changes.  

With Live Visual Tree, you see a real-time view of your running XAML code, which is structured as a tree view of the hierarchy of all UI elements in your running app. 

XCode 14 and .NET 7 Support 

.NET MAUI for .NET 7 focuses on improved performance and functionality, as we have addressed your top feedback issues and is fully cross-platform, so you can take advantage of these on your Mac! 

We shipped XCode 14 support for Visual Studio for Mac last month. Support for XCode 14.1 is coming soon in an upcoming service release! 

Getting Started  

Get Started today with .NET MAUI and .NET 7 by installing Visual Studio for Mac 17.4. See the video below, and check out our documentation & samples for more information. We are also publishing a new activation tutorial soon with interactive steps that will walk you through building your first .NET MAUI app.

We will keep working hard to add more functionality to .NET MAUI projects, including .NET (C#) Hot Reload and XAML Live Preview throughout the next releases. In the meantime, please submit your feature requests and bug reports through the Help > Report a Problem menu to help us guide our next releases.  

Thank you to all of you who have tried .NET MAUI and given us feedback on the preview releases since August through survey responses, bug reports and various community discussions. Your feedback is crucial for us to guide our next steps of .NET MAUI in Visual Studio for Mac. We are excited to see you try .NET MAUI and we hope to keep improving your development productivity.   

How to give us feedback:  

  • You can file new SDK issues on GitHub in the dotnet/maui repo. 
  • You can use the Help > Report a Problem or Help > Provide a Suggestion menus to share feedback.  
  • You can go to the Visual Studio for Mac Developer Community site to vote for your favorites. 

Author

Bilge Zeren Aksu
Product Manager

11 comments

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  • Divine Nkwati

    Hi
    MAUI project template does not show-up after updating to Visual Studio 2022 version 17.4.2.
    I am using MACOS 13.1 on M1.
    Any assistant please.

  • Alem Dervisevic · Edited

    Please add Drag and Drop Designer for Layout .
    Some like Windows Forms.
    it is faster to create a Design layout with a drag and drop designer than with xaml code

  • David Pruitt

    Please prioritize including a XAML designer/previewer in Visual Studio for .Net MAUI. Hot Reload is not an acceptable replacement for a design-time GUI development.

  • Alem Dervisevic

    Why Xamarin and .NET MAUI don’t have a UI designer, that’s a big mistake, it’s a waste to write XAML code to get a simple interface.
    Please do Designer for Xamarin and MAUI .
    Thx.

    • Dave Doknjas

      You don’t need a UI designer if you can ‘see’ in xaml.

      • Alem Dervisevic

        it is faster to create a Design layout with a drag and drop designer than with xaml code

      • Dave Doknjas · Edited

        I agree with you 100%. I was being sarcastic. I can’t understand Microsoft’s lagging in this area at all. They came up with the first useful intuitive UI designer after all (classic VB) way back in the early 90’s.

  • Qui Bono

    STILL no BundledResource option for iOS. My GoogleServices-Info.plist is not being found.
    Come on guys, are you serious about making MAUI production-ready?

  • Charles Roddie

    This is good. With this update one might say MAUI is effectively released.

    What is the status of multiple platform projects? Is that supported? I believe that having multiple projects is the best approach to managing bugs: can avoid bugs fro MAUI coming from the complexity of the single-project idea, and if a user gets a platform bug it is clear what code is active for that platform, so is easiest to fix user code too.

    Read more
  • Anonymous

    Please add support for MAUI on Linux!