Chapter 15 Conclusion

Social Media

There is a whole host of social media options such as LinkedIn, Discord, Twitter, and Facebook. I urge you to find the platform that works best for you and start finding and following people that work on or with the technology.

Yet More Goodness

It is impossible to provide a curated list of all the great content creators or resources in printed form. It will instantly become outdated. In fact, by the time you have finished this book you have may well have become another name to add to this list! For that reason, here is a great resource that provides a curated list: https://github.com/jfversluis/learn- dotnet-maui.

Looking Forward

While .NET MAUI offers us a lot, there is still so much more that will evolve. I fully expect there to be some extensive work applied to improving the ability to test the user interfaces of .NET MAUI applications along with further enhancements in the usage of .NET MAUI graphics, which has the potential to not only render applications identically across each platform (which is very similar to how Flutter works) but also to boost performance by moving away from the native controls that come with Android. Some key areas to keep an eye on are as follows.

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Chapter 15 Conclusion

Upgrading fromXamarin.Forms

I would like to see where the dotnet upgrade assistant goes. This will likely prove vital to any existing applications built against Xamarin.Forms. There has been work on it so far, but at the time of writing it is in preview. There are documented steps on how to manually migrate applications with the following two links covering how this can be achieved:

https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/get-started/migrate https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/migration/

I can confirm that I have followed through the above steps in order to migrate a relatively simple application from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI. Of course, if your application is more involved and uses concepts

that are now obsolete (Renderers, Effects, etc.), then the migration process could be much more involved. While I do expect the dotnet upgrade assistant to make this task easier, I highly doubt it will get to a point where it will do everything for us. In fact, I suggest you take this as a good exercise to review what your Xamarin.Forms application currently does and whether there are better ways to achieve things moving forwards.

Comet

I have been surprised by what Comet has to offer despite it also being in preview/proof of concept at the time of writing. David Ortinau, a Program Manager on the .NET MAUI team, has praised the work that has come out of the Comet investigation, stating that a lot of the evolutionary steps from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI were largely influenced by this work.

https://github.com/dotnet/Comet

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Chapter 15 Conclusion

Testing

The topic of testing really does excite me! I have spent recent months working with development and test teams to help build processes and infrastructure focused heavily on testing. Having the ability to automate testing of applications will be a huge leap forwards. As I covered in Chapter 12, there is the Xamarin.UITest framework for testing Xamarin. Forms applications. Like the technology it was testing, it had its failings/ challenges. Therefore, the idea of rewriting and exploring new testing approaches is very much a good thing in my book. I won’t lie; I would have loved it sooner–certainly before this book was published–but nonetheless having it being worked on is positive.

I know that I will be keeping an eye on this repository, and if testing is important to you (and it should be), you should do so also. One further great advantage is that with the framework being developed in the open, we as the potential consumers have the power to get involved and influence the final result.

https://github.com/Redth/Maui.UITesting

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