Microsoft .NET MAUI Preview 11 updates Windows UI styling

Preview 11 of Microsoft’s .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), a cross-platform development framework for creating native mobile and desktop applications, has arrived, bringing introductory support for Windows 11 UI styling and support for multi-window applications.

An evolution of Xamarin.Forms, .NET MAUI allows .NET developers to build native apps for iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows with C# and XAML. The latest preview, which was unveiled January 5, runs on the latest preview of .NET and is available with Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2 on Windows.

In support of Windows 11 UI styling based on the Fluent Design System, Preview 11 includes updates to MAUI’s Button, Entry, and Editor controls. Windows 11 includes an update to Fluent, and .NET MAUI styles controls to use the latest version.

Also featured in .NET MAUI Preview 11:

• .NET MAUI introduces support for multiple windows in applications, a major update compared to Xamarin.Forms. Application.Current.Windows holds references to all windows created. The Windows App SDK implementation of multi-window will be in an experimental release for now.
• Templates have been updated to use C# 10 patterns such as implicit usings and file-scraped namespaces. Item templates have been added for ContentPage and ContentView.
• To unify Xamarin SDKs with .NET 6, Microsoft has been updating Apple-related SDKs to use native nint and nuint types in .NET 6 rather than System.nint and System.nuint. This impacts libraries for iOS, MacOS, and tvOS using .NET 6. To adopt this change, developers must recompile code against .NET 6. To explicitly use any of these types, developers should update their .NET 6 code to use the C# types.
• New documentation has been published for .NET MAUI.