.NET MAUI — Upcoming Features (v22.2)

Our primary goal for our next major .NET MAUI release is to build a solid base for future development should MAUI adoption increase and overall demand rise. We expect to address a series of platform-related challenges and simplify mobile development for beginners and improve the overall experience of seasoned MAUI devs. Needless to say, quality and performance remain atop our priority list. 

In this post, I’ll summarize the .NET MAUI-related features we expect to deliver in v22.2. As always, your feedback will help us fine-tune our overall strategy. Please take a moment to answer the survey questions below once you acquaint yourself with our dev plans.

Get Started with DevExpress .NET MAUI Mobile Controls

For those considering .NET MAUI, please be sure to download our free distribution available till the end of 2022: Free Offer from DevExpress. If you are new to .NET MAUI and our .NET MAUI UI components, please review the following learning materials to acquaint yourself with the DevExpress .NET MAUI product line: Get Started with DevExpress Controls for .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) | YouTube videos. 

Material 3 Design

Appearance is among the first things users evaluate during application use. As you may know, Material Design is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that adhere to user interface design best practices. We expect to modernize our .NET MAUI product line with the help of Material 3 Design guidelines and help you create elegant applications with absolute ease.

Themes - Performance and Usability

We will optimize and enhance the way our controls are represented internally in XAML code. This will produce the following benefits: Startup time will be reduced (approximately by 20% according to our initial tests) Implicit styles will work properly for all controls You will be able to customize all controls in a similar manner

Simplify .NET MAUI Control Localization

At present, you can only localize our .NET MAUI controls if you set localized values to component properties in code. In v22.2, we hope to create APIs that will help you localize your application with ease - across multiple languages without implementing any complex logic.

Hot Reload

As you may know, Hot Reload is a Visual Studio feature that enables you to view the result of XAML changes in a running app, without having to rebuild your project. This capability may significantly reduce the time it takes to adjust a view to your requirements. We expect to support Hot Reload for all .NET MAUI controls. Like other features described in this post, this addition should help introduce faster/more straightforward development processes.

Visual Studio for Mac - Project Templates

For your quick start on Mac, we will create project templates that will help you get started with our controls with a few clicks. Here are our current project templates for Visual Studio for Windows:

You will be able to use similar templates within Visual Studio for Mac.

ComboBox & AutoCompleteEdit Multiple Selection

Selecting multiple items from a dropdown is a common user scenario that we expect to support in our ComboBox and AutoComplete Editors:

Support Cross-Platform DevExpress.Data Library

We will migrate our mobile-specific fork/clone to the full-featured version of the DevExpress.Data library currently used by all DevExpress customers on other .NET UI platforms. This migration will help us:

• Deliver a seamless user experience (API-wise) for DevExpress customers who have used our WinForms, WPF and ASP.NET components in the past.
• Make code sharing across multiple platforms easier. Example: Presently, our .NET MAUI customers are using CriteriaOperator from the "DevExpress.XamarinForms.Core.Filtering" namespace. In the future, these customers will use the "DevExpress.Data.Filtering" namespace instead.
• Automatically add new features to our .NET MAUI data grid, collection view, etc. Example: advanced mask input and performance enhancements powered by the DataController from our WinForms/WPF data grids or the new CriteriaOperator.FromLambda API.

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