With the release of .NET 6, we also saw the release of Visual Studio 2022 which includes Xamarin support for Android 12, Apple’s Xcode 13 releases and the latest Xamarin.Forms service release.
As previously announced by Microsoft, we did not see the release of .NET MAUI with .NET 6 as the release was pushed back to Q2 2022 in order to ensure a high-quality release. So in the meantime, Xamarin is still recommended for building production mobile apps and .NET MAUI continues with monthly preview releases.
Let’s take a look.
Visual Studio 2022
Visual Studio 2022 is now available and the release focussed on the edit and debug cycle.
Exciting for development speed is IntelliCode (see previous blogs from Microsoft), which is available with Visual Studio 2022. With IntelliCode, developers can spend less time typing with whole lines of code being completed by the AI-assisted code companion. Also, if you find yourself making repeated edits within your code, it can spot the pattern and suggest fixes for the whole codebase.
Previewed in Visual Studio 2019, the Hot Reload full experience now shipped with Visual Studio 2022. This means you can update your code and see the changes immediately without having to wait for apps to rebuild, restart, re-navigate to the previous location, etc.
There is a LONG list of new capabilities and fixes to aid developers, which you can read through in the release notes.
If you want to hear more, the Visual Studio 2022 release video with Scott Hanselman is available to watch on YouTube here: Welcome to Visual Studio 2022
Xamarin in Visual Studio 2022
All recent service releases of Xamarin.Forms and .NET bindings from Google and Apple are available in the new stable release of Visual Studio 2022 (as well as servicing releases of Visual Studio 2019).
Xamarin.Forms applications get all the many improvements that come with Visual Studio 2022. A particularly exciting feature is the XAML Live Preview. It mirrors the running app within Visual Studio, enabling the adding of layout guides and more.
As an aside, in October, Xamarin.Forms 5.0 service release 6 shipped with the next set of fixes. Service release 6 includes support for Android 12 and iOS 15.
.NET MAUI Preview Release 10
Along with the stable release of .NET 6, last week also saw the preview 10 release of .NET MAUI. It includes the merging of the remaining Windows App SDK dependencies and further advancement on the remaining controls and control features.
You can see a complete list of the changes and improvements on GitHub here: release notes.
Note on installation
You will need to be using the preview version of Visual Studio 2022 (17.1). When installing, you need the “Mobile development with .NET” workload which by default provides the “.NET MAUI (Preview)” dependencies. In the future, .NET MAUI will be its own top-level workload.
