About the Author

Shaun Lawrence is an experienced software engineer who has been specializing in building mobile and desktop applications for the past 15 years. He is a recognized Microsoft MVP in Development Technologies; his work helps the community learn and build with Xamarin Forms, the predecessor to .NET MAUI. His recent discovery of the value he can add by sharing his experience with others has thrust

him on to the path of wanting to find any way possible to continue to do so. Shaun actively maintains several open-source projects within the .NET

community. A key project for the scope of this book is the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit where he predominantly focuses on building good quality documentation for developers to consume. Shaun lives in the United Kingdom with his wife, two children, and their dog.

Shaun can be found on Twitter @Bijington, on his blog at https://blog.bijington.com, or on LinkedIn at ­www.linkedin.com/in/ shaun-lawrence-53a0099/.  

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About the Technical Reviewer

Gerald Versluis is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on .NET MAUI. Since 2009 Gerald has been working on a variety

of projects, ranging from front end to back end and anything in between that involves Azure, ASP.NET, and all kinds of other .NET technologies. At some point he fell in love with cross-platform and mobile development with Xamarin. Since then he has become an active

community member, writing, tweeting, and presenting about all things tech. Gerald can be found on Twitter @jfversluis, blogging at https:// blog.verslu.is, or on his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/ @jfversluis.  

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Acknowledgments

I have a number of people that I would like to thank for their assistance. Firstly, Dan: Your assistance in both reviewing my content and also talking through each of my worries and ideas definitely encouraged me

to write.

Secondly, Gerald: You have been fundamental from start to finish. You encouraged me to accept this project, helped me with decisions, reviewed the content, and provided fantastic guidance throughout!

Thirdly, the team at Apress: From Joan for initially reaching out to me in order to present this opportunity, to the rest of the team of Jill, Gryffin, and Laura for answering all of my questions and guiding me through this process.

Finally, my family—my wife, Levinia, daughters Zoey and Hollie, and dog, Soco: Without your encouragement I would not have taken the leap to embark upon this writing journey. I am so grateful for all your help and the sacrifices made to help get me over the line.

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Introduction

Welcome to Introducing .NET MAUI.

This book is for developers who are new to .NET MAUI and cross-­platform development. You should have basic knowledge of C# but require no prior knowledge of using .NET MAUI. The content ranges from beginner through to more advanced topics and is therefore tailored to meet a wide range of experiences.

This book provides an in-depth explanation of each key concept in

.NET MAUI, and you will use these concepts in practical examples while building a cross-platform application. The content has been designed to primarily flow with the building of this application; however, there

is a secondary theme that involves grouping as many related concepts as possible. The idea behind this is to both learn as you go and also to have content that closely resembles reference information, which makes returning to this book as easy as possible.

All code examples in this book, unless otherwise stated, are applied directly to the application you are building. Once key concepts have been established, the book will offer improvements or alternatives to simplify your life as you build production-worthy applications. The book does not rely upon these simplifications as part of the practical examples and the reason for this is simple: I strongly believe that you need to understand the concepts before you start to use them.

Finally, all chapters that involve adding code into the application project contain a link to the resulting source code. This is to show the final product and for you to use as a comparison if anything goes wrong during your building of the application.

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