Herding Code 246 – David Ortinau on .NET MAUI

Jon talks to David Ortinau about .NET MAUI.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 246: David Ortinau on .NET MAI

Link: Introducing .NET MAUI – One Codebase, Many Platforms (.NET blog)

Transcript:

Jon: Hello, and welcome to Herding Code. This episode is being recorded May 16th, 2022. Today I’m talking to David Ortinau now about .NET MAUI. Welcome David.

David: Hey, good to see you.

Jon: Okay, so let’s start with the basics. What the heck is .NET MAUI? I, I mean, I know there’s kind of Xamarin thing out there forms and now there’s .NET MAUI.

David: So .NET MAUI, it stands for multi-platform app UI. And it is really the evolution of Xamarin. So Xamarin is it started, you know, like 10, 12 years ago, Mono framework, Mono Touch, Mono Droid it was essentially saying, Hey, let’s take what Apple and Google are doing these mobile platforms that are super cool, and let’s bring it to .NET developers.

And it was an open source thing, you know, at least as far as the runtime and things like that go but it was kind of out there in the community. And then what, six years ago, Microsoft acquired it. and then five years ago, I joined Microsoft to be the program manager for Xamarin forms, specifically, the that, you know, we favor XAML, but you can totally just use C# or F# actually to write your mobile applications, but it was a very mobile focus thing. Right? So, we have been doing in the .NET space over years is, unifying, taking all these things that were disparate, they all had different routes in terms of where they started, but .NET You know, we anything with .NET and be able to reuse not only the technology, but our skills. So. you know, dot .NET framework turned core .NET five shipped five unified, some of the model pieces and some of the BCL pieces BCL standing for base class library.

And then, grandiose that was when Xamarin would also become really a core part of .NET,

however pandemic things you know, best laid plans of mice and then things didn’t quite go the way we want.

Jon: Well also, plus it’s, it’s a big job, right? I mean, like uniting everything and you’ve had like .NET and C#, or like there’s similar specifications, but like the whole way that, that mano and Xamarin worked always seemed like it was amazing to me that it actually worked right.

David: Yeah. It was the ingenuity of some very smart people that made it at work. But you know, outside of Microsoft’s doors, really, even before everything was mostly open-sourced there was a lot of duct taping to make things work. Make it a good developer experience. So we’re now able to in the open source era and as part of Microsoft kind of rectify some of those things. So, you know, we’re adopting SDK style projects, the same project system that the rest of .NET uses. And, and we’ve also added platforms. So now. Give a first place support to Windows and Mac desktops. So that’s a big really have. I mean, we kind of had UWP but that really started because we had this. Windows phone thing. You know, and I don’t want to like trigger anybody, but it was pretty cool.

yeah, so, I mean, yeah, you’re absolutely right. Tons of stuff that, that have ne has needed to happen under the hood from the runtime, the base class library, unifying all the API APIs and. In terms of Xamarin, there’s some things that we did with types for end, float and end and things like that, to, to make things work with apple that are non-standard dot .NET things.

So in .NET 6 we unified our types, which, you know in the short term, there’s definitely some pain, not gonna, not going to sugarcoat that but in the longterm, you know, we’re going to see some nice gains, and consistency across the whole thing. So very excited that we finally, after years of transition we’re bringing.

To full GA fruition here in .NET 6 Well, as part of the, as Scott, hunter would like to say the .NET 6.

wave, I think wave works really good with the name .NET

Jon: Oh, nice. Nice. Okay. So, so the.

Top level I’m totally not even a .NET developer. I haven’t been keeping up the high level is I can write C# or .NET code and I can build applications. That’ll run on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows.

David: Exactly and their native applications. That’s a key differentiator. So that means that when your app runs on iOS or Android or Window...