.NET 6 went into its first preview in the middle of February. Though it is not due for release until November, .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) is worth taking a look a look at now. It is something to understand and get excited about, with a lot of changes coming.
The key takeaway for what this means for Xamarin developers, is rather than Xamarin being related to, similar to but separate to .NET, it will simply be part of .NET. In .NET 6, Xamarin will not ship as a side product but rather as a core workload (as .NET MAUI), sharing the same base class library and using the modern SDK Style project system.
A key change is the standardised naming, in fact, it looks like the Xamarin name will be dropped altogether, instead you will start to see things like .NET for iOS or .NET for Android.
.NET MAUI, as the evolution of Xamarin.Forms, continues to be a cross-platform tool and it will embrace Android iOS, macOS and Windows. Despite the name change, in some ways it is just the next version of the product we already love.
Don’t worry if you’ve only recently begun on Xamarin, want to start using Xamarin or if you have built extensively within it, there will be a migration path to .NET MAUI once everything is generally available and custom renderers will still work.
Find Out More about .NET Multi-Platform App UI
If you want to dive in and see all the new features which will be available as well as some demos of it in use, here are some handy links:
