Xamarin

.NET MAUI Preview on Mac

Visual Studio for Mac is not supporting the current .NET preview. But that doesn't mean that you cannot start to play with MAUI. But you have to use the terminal and for example Visual Studio Code.

Install .NET MAUI

If you do not have installed the preview yet, I recommend you to do that with the Maui Check Tool, https://github.com/Redth/dotnet-maui-check. That will guide you through the process and make sure that you have everything you need install.

Create a project

To create a new project, just use the dotnet new command as with all .NET Core/.NET 5 projects.

dotnet new maui -n MyFirstMauiApp

or this for a MAUI Blazor (Hybrid app) project.

dotnet new maui-blazor -n MyFirstMauiApp

If you want to take a look at a sample app, you may have seen the Weather Twenty One app by David Ortinau. That project is open-source and a good app to sample to start with if you want to explore MAUI, https://github.com/davidortinau/WeatherTwentyOne.

Run a .NET MAUI app

When you want to run an MAUI app from a command, you need to specify what framework you want to use, for example, .NET 6 iOS.

# iOS
dotnet build {YourProjectName} -t:Run -f net6.0-ios
# MacOS
dotnet build {YourProjectName} -t:Run -f net6.0-maccatalyst
# Android
dotnet build {YourProjectName} -t:Run -f net6.0-android
Weather Twenty One app running on Mac Catalyst and iOS simulator

Weather Twenty One app running on Mac Catalyst and iOS simulator

Run on a specific iOS simulator

When you started the iOS project, it probary started on an iPad simulator. If you want to use another simulator you need to set the UDID of the simulator in the command like this:

dotnet build {YourProjectName} -t:Run -f net6.0-ios /p:_DeviceName=:v2:udid={DeviceUDID}

To get all UDID:s run the following command:

xcrun simctl list

Run on an Android emulator

To run it on an Android emulator, just start the emulator before you start the app.

Weather Twenty One app running on Android emulator

Weather Twenty One app running on Android emulator

More resources

Official MAUI Sample repo - https://github.com/dotnet/maui-samples
MAUI source code - https://github.com/dotnet/maui
Announcing .NET MAUI Preview 4 - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-maui-preview-4

GitHub Actions and Cake for TinyMvvm

To build and publish TinyMvvm I have used Azure Pipelines and a classic build pipeline together with a release pipeline. For the upcoming 3.0 release (in preview right now) I have migrated the pipeline to GitHub Actions. There are several reasons for that:

  • I want to make the CI/CD open so all can see what happend. You can have an open project in Azure DevOps as well, but the project we use for building TinyStuff libraries are to old to make public and I felt that I it was better to use the time to migrate to GitHub Actions according to the other reasons.

  • I want to have everything together, GitHub Actions is according to me better integrated in GitHub.

  • I feel that GitHub Actions is the future, both Azure DevOps and GitHub is Microsoft products and what I can see, Microsoft have mor focus on GitHub Actions.

  • GitHub feels like the natural place for Open Source.

To define the build I decided to use Cake and the reasons for that is:

  • Cake is cross-service. So if I want to move it to an other service I can resuse the most parts. Many services using yaml, but with different flawors of it, so it cannot be reused, not even between the both Microsoft controlled products GitHub Action and Azure Pipelines. The Cake scripts will be easy to use in all major services.
  • It is C# and I like to be able to use C# for defining the build and publish steps.
  • It is Open Source and easy to extend.

The only downside for Cake is that thera are not much good documentation about how to use it. There are good API-documentation, but not so much "How to"-documentation. But if you know how the underlying processes works it will be pretty easy to get started anyway.

GitHub Actions

I have defined two actions so far for TinyMvvm, one for when codes is pushed and one for when a released is published.

Push

Everytime code is pushed to either the master branch or to a pull request the code is built to verify that noting is broken.

You can find details about the action here:
https://github.com/TinyStuff/TinyMvvm/blob/3.0/.github/workflows/main.yml

Release

When I manually create a release in GitHub this action will trigger, the name I will give the tag will be used for the version number for tha package.

The Release action will build the code from the tag and it will publish the packages to NuGet.

You can find details about the action here:
https://github.com/TinyStuff/TinyMvvm/blob/3.0/.github/workflows/release.yml

Cake

The cake script has three tasks defined; Build, Pack and Publish. The build action, only runs the build task. The Release actions is running all tasks.