Is Xamarin really dead?

MAUI — Multi-Platform App UI rise from ashes of Xamarin

(source ProjectPhoenixRisingAgain)

We must remember the year 2011, the year when Xamarin was firstly introduced to the market. Since then, it has improved a lot. There were many enhancements within the way to its current position. It has helped many companies and developers to create awesome cross-platform applications. But it’s a time to say goodbye to Xamarin and say hello to .NET MAUI.

Let’s give a quick look at Xamarin’s past, present, and future

1. Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016.

2. Microsoftannounced a new face of cross-platform app development known as .NET MAUI.

What is .NET MAUI?

.NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) is a cross-platform framework to develop native mobile and desktop apps using C# and XAML.

Benefits of .NET MAUI.

1- Project Structure: It is based on a single project structure, Instead of Xamarin.Forms that contain separate projects for each targeted platform, .NET MUAI project will only contain a single project that will run on all supported platforms.

2- Design Patterns: There are other benefits of .NET MAUI as it supports multiple design patterns to develop apps. It will support MVVM, MVU, and Blazor development patterns.

3- Performance: A lot of people complain about Xamarin.Forms performance and app startup time, which is going to be addressed in .NET MAUI. It will replace custom renderers with handlers that are designed to be more performant and extensible. MAUI will also continue to benefit from performance improvements made in the dot net platform.

4- MAUI Blazor: Apps written in MAUI blazor can run on desktop, which means web developers can take benefits from UI written in Html/CSS and can also access device capabilities if they are targeting native applications. All the apps written in MAUI blazor can run on Android, iOS, and macOS as well.

These are some of the benefits you can get by developing apps through .NET MAUI. Still, we are getting preview versions of .NET MAUI so we can expect a lot of things to come within the way to get a stable update of MAUI.

Future for Xamarin.

Xamarin will completely be replaced by .NET MAUI. and Microsoft will not support Xamarin after some time because it will be fully incorporated in the .NET ecosystem. MAUI promises to deliver better features than Xamarin so, we should embrace it as a more experienced player in cross-platform development.

Migration.

Besides all the benefits of .NET MAUI, here comes the migration process. As Microsoft shifted towards .NET MAUI then the previous Xamarin projects also need a sift. There are some guidelines given by Microsoft to shift existing Xamarin projects to MAUI. But we should not worry about migration until the stable version of MAUI lands in the market.

You can also see migration steps from this documentation given by Microsoft.

Author

Originally published at https://medium.com on December 27, 2021.