MAUI

Upgrading Xamarin.Forms projects to .NET MAUI with upgrade assistant

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MAUI is still in preview state, so the production apps are not recommended to upgrade to .NET MAUI. But it is important to be open to new technology, so take some time to review the update.

It’s possible that by the time you read this post, you’ll be able to convert a MAUI projects from UI, but it’s not currently an available feature for me.

What you will need

  • Windows machine
  • Visual Studio 2022 installed

Install required tools for MAUI

Open a command prompt and give out the following command:

dotnet workload install maui

If you have installed maui already, then you wont need to run this command again.

Install upgrade-assistant

There is a tool developed by Microsoft, not originally for MAUI, but because it is based on a fully extensible model, it has been made available for MAUI projects. Xamarin.Forms projects can be translated to the new version of the projects with this app:
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/upgrade-assistant

dotnet tool install --global upgrade-assistant

Use the upgrade assistant

It is important to note that this application cannot independently translate Xamarin.Forms apps to MAUI. It only helps us in the upgrade process.

That’s why the app asks for constant instructions, so we can’t leave the machine running while we make coffee 🙂

Let’s change the directory of your command prompt to the directory where you store the .sln file

upgrade-assistant upgrade SolutionName.sln

Watch out for the output of the console. If everything goes well, your solution can be transformed to maui without issues.

In the header section of the console output, you will see what steps are required (or suggested) in order to complete the migration. You can decide what to do with the next step: Apply, skip, or do something else with it. If everything goes well, you will only need to press apply.

The output of the upgrade-assistant

Once you have finished the upgrade assistant process, you can see the changes. Mostly in source codes and project files.

Namespace changes

This content has 1 year. Some of the information in this post may be out of date or no longer work. Please, read this page keeping its age in your mind.

Setup .NET MAUI project on macOS

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You may also be interested to know how Xamarin.Forms has grown and who will be its successor. I was interested too, so I took the time between the two holidays to test the .NET MAUI developed by Microsoft, so you’ll get a couple of articles about it. First, I’ll show you the installation and how I managed it under macOS.

It’s possible that by the time you read this post, you’ll be able to create a MAUI project from UI, but it’s not currently an available feature for me. However, a lot of the tutorials were outdated because .NET 6 with VisualStudio2022 has been released, and xCode 13 is not in beta either, so you can skip some unnecessary installations.

But what is definitely needed

  • macOS capable device,
  • Visual Studio 2022,
  • xCode 13.

Get started on macOS

First thing first, fire up your macOS terminal, because we will start working in that.

If you havent installed Redth’s MAUI check tool yet, lets do this with the command

dotnet tool install -g redth.net.maui.check

Once it has been successfully installed, you will see the following output

You can invoke the tool using the following command: maui-check
Tool 'redth.net.maui.check' (version '0.10.0') was successfully installed.

So it says, that you can invoke the maui-check command from now on, but it’s a lie, since some things of ZSH terminal, we need to manually fresh up the terminals internal things, otherwise the maui-check command will fail with “Unknown command”.

export PATH=$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH

From now on, you can freely invoke the

maui-check

Which results you the following output:

      _   _   _____   _____     __  __      _      _   _   ___                  
     | \ | | | ____| |_   _|   |  \/  |    / \    | | | | |_ _|                 
     |  \| | |  _|     | |     | |\/| |   / _ \   | | | |  | |                  
  _  | |\  | | |___    | |     | |  | |  / ___ \  | |_| |  | |                  
 (_) |_| \_| |_____|   |_|     |_|  |_| /_/   \_\  \___/  |___|                 
                                                                                
? .NET MAUI Check v0.10.0.0 ?
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
This tool will attempt to evaluate your .NET MAUI development environment.
If problems are detected, this tool may offer the option to try and fix them for
you, or suggest a way to fix them yourself.

Thanks for choosing .NET MAUI!
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
⏳ Synchronizing configuration... ok
⏳ Scheduling appointments... ok

It can fix a lot of things for you automatically, watch the output carefully, it prompts that you want to fix the issues or not.

To be honest, i don’t know this command will do the work any of the things above, but if you run this, after doing the things above, its also fine:

sudo dotnet workload install maui

Create a new MAUI project

Lets find a suitable place for our new project, then give out the following command:

dotnet new maui -n YourMauiProjectName

From now on, you can leave the terminal, and start editing the project in your favourite IDE, example the VS2022

Run your very first application

Since the projects are cannot be set as run projects in Visual Studio 2022 yet, we need to run our apps from the command line with this command

dotnet build YourMauiProjectName -t:Run -f net6.0-maccatalyst

This will run your app with mac Catalyst compilation, but you can create Android and iOS versions also with this command

This content has 1 year. Some of the information in this post may be out of date or no longer work. Please, read this page keeping its age in your mind.