Summary

You should now feel a bit more comfortable with what .NET mobile is and how .NET MAUI relates to .NET mobile.

In this chapter, we established a definition of what a native app is and saw how it has a native UI, performance, and API access. We talked about how .NET mobile uses Mono, which is an open source implementation of the .NET Framework, and discussed how, at its core, .NET mobile is a set of bindings to platform-specific APIs. We then looked at how .NET for iOS and .NET for Android work under the hood.

After that, we began to touch on the core topic of this book, which is .NET MAUI. We started with an overview of how platform-agnostic controls are rendered to platform-specific controls and how to use XAML to define a hierarchy of controls to assemble a page. We then spent some time looking at the difference between a .NET MAUI app and a traditional .NET mobile app.

A traditional .NET mobile app uses platform-specific APIs directly, without any abstraction, other than what .NET adds as a platform. .NET MAUI is an API that is built on top of the traditional .NET APIs and allows us to define platform-agnostic GUIs in XAML or in code that is rendered to platform-specific controls. There’s more to .NET MAUI than this, but this is what it does at its core.

In the last part of this chapter, we discussed how to set up a development machine on Windows or macOS. Finally, we looked at three optional features that you can use to help improve your development cycle: Hot Restart, Hot Reload, and WSA.

Now, it’s time to put our newly acquired knowledge to use! We will start by creating a to-do app from the ground up in the next chapter. We will look at concepts such as Model–View–ViewModel (MVVM) for a clean separation between business logic and the UI and SQLite.NET to persist data to a local database on our device. We will do this for three platforms at the same time—so, read on!