This content originally appeared on Telerik Blogs and was authored by Sam Basu
Welcome to the Sands of MAUI—newsletter-style issues dedicated to bringing together the latest .NET MAUI content relevant to developers.
A particle of sand—tiny and innocuous. But put a lot of sand particles together and we have something big—a force to reckon with. It is the smallest grains of sand that often add up to form massive beaches, dunes and deserts.
.NET developers are excited with the reality of .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI)—the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform developer technology stack. With stable tooling and a rich ecosystem, .NET MAUI empowers developers to build native cross-platform apps for mobile/desktop from single shared codebase, while inviting web technologies in the mix.
While it may take a long flight to reach the sands of MAUI island, developer excitement around .NET MAUI is quite palpable with all the created content. Like the grains of sand, every piece of news/article/documentation/video/tutorial/livestream contributes toward developer experiences in .NET MAUI and we grow a community/ecosystem willing to learn and help.
Sands of MAUI is a humble attempt to collect all the .NET MAUI awesomeness in one place. Here’s what is noteworthy for the week of June 30, 2025:
XAML Improvements
.NET MAUI is the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform development stack, allowing developers to reach mobile and desktop form factors from a single shared codebase. Building .NET MAUI UI with XAML continues to be the most popular approach. XAML is great to define complex visual trees, good for hot reload and supports powerful state flow with data binding. However, XAML UI markup does have the tendency to get verbose with every view needing declared namespaces and prefixes. There is definitely scope for optimization, and David Ortinau wrote up an announcement—simpler XAML in .NET MAUI 10.
Inspired by global and implicit uses for C#, .NET MAUI is adopting brevity with XAML starting with .NET 10 Preview 5. Developers can now leverage implicit namespaces and define them all in a global namespace—all XAML files in the .NET MAUI codebase can use the namespaces throughout.
Opting in to use implicit namespaces is a simple configuration in the project file and developers can omit the use of XAML prefixes altogether. Disambiguating prefix types is achieved with attributes that point to the full path in XmlnsDefinition. All of these are very welcome changes and should lead to clean, simple XAML markup to define .NET MAUI UI—cheers!
.NET MAUI TreeDataGrid
.NET MAUI is built to enable .NET developers to create cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, with deep platform integrations, native UI and hybrid web experiences. Modern app users demand rich UX from cross-platform apps, and developers can use all the help—.NET MAUI and Telerik UI are here to oblige. The last release brought an exciting new addition to Telerik UI for .NET MAUI—say hello the Telerik TreeDataGrid for .NET MAUI.
The TreeDataGrid UI component is a powerful fusion of hierarchical data navigation and tabular presentation. As the name suggests, the control offers the combined functionality of a TreeView and a DataGrid, allowing developers to display complex nested data structures in a clear, intuitive grid format. With support for infinite nesting, multiple columns and rich cell presentation, the TreeDataGrid control is ideal for scenarios where expandable, tree-structured data must be managed efficiently.
Apart from the popular DataGrid functionalities, key features include dynamic add/remove of sub-items, expand/collapse support, auto-expand, customizable indentation and a flexible IsExpandable option—providing developers with granular control over hierarchical UI rendering.
Vision AI with .NET MAUI
It is the age of AI, and there is a huge opportunity for .NET developers to infuse apps with solutions powered by generative AI and large/small language models. Modern cross-platform apps have to work hard for user attention, and AI-powered features might be the differentiator. Thankfully for .NET MAUI developers wanting to leverage AI, there is quite a bit of help, and David Ortinau wrote up a great article—multimodal vision intelligence with .NET MAUI.
David had showcased an AI-driven to-do list sample app at Build earlier this year, and it was time to add more functionality. Wouldn’t it be nice if the mobile version of the to-do app could allow users to capture or select an image and have AI extract actionable information from it to create a project and associated tasks? The MediaPicker UI provides a single cross-platform API for working with photo gallery, media picking and taking photos—the easy abstraction .NET MAUI developers need.
Processing of an image can be handed off to AI, and Microsoft.Extensions.AI abstraction can help—the IChatClient can be handed the image bytes, along with instructions. If fed the correct type of image, vision-capable AI models can respond back with a proposed set of projects and tasks—up for human review and a great showcase of how to augment .NET MAUI app functionality with AI.
GitHub Copilot Productivity
Modern AI is big opportunity to streamline and automate developer workflows for better productivity. GitHub Copilot is already one of the most popular and productive coding assistants for developers—an AI pair programmer that helps developers write better code. The AI experience is getting better in both VS Code/Visual Studio, and Leslie Richardson wrote up the announcement—improved productivity using GitHub Copilot for .NET developers.
The Visual Studio 17.14 GA release and recent C# Dev Kit releases for VS Code have introduced a whole new batch of GitHub Copilot features designed to make the .NET development experience more efficient and productive. The pair programmer paradigm is quickly shifting to peer programming—supercharged Agent modes are now the default, with support for full Model Context Protocol (MCP) specs. There is improved context awareness with existing code and freshness in coding responses with integrated MSFT Learn, along with added support for easy documentation. To the stars for developer productivity with GitHub Copilot.
.NET Aspire Basics
Most modern apps are not giant monoliths anymore. Instead, application stacks are made up of bite-sized microservices, each isolated and deployed separately to make up parts of digital confetti. While such cloud native architectures bring better resiliency and configurability, the cognitive load is also real—this is where .NET Aspire shines. Dave Brock has started a five-part exploratory series on .NET Aspire, and the first post is out—what is .NET Aspire.
Microservices architectures have big benefits, like on-demand infrastructure, independent deployments and self-healing resilience. But there is a cost to pay in terms of complexity, dependencies and lots of configurations. With .NET Aspire, developers get an opinionated toolkit that brings together best practices around service discovery, health checks, telemetry, secret management and more, all with easy built-in defaults.
This should be an enthralling series that dives into all the different wire-ups and orchestrations on offer—a better understanding of .NET Aspire for developers.
That’s it for now.
We’ll see you next week with more awesome content relevant to .NET MAUI.
Cheers, developers!
This content originally appeared on Telerik Blogs and was authored by Sam Basu
Sam Basu | Sciencx (2025-06-30T16:15:43+00:00) Sands of MAUI: Issue #191. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/30/sands-of-maui-issue-191/
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