.NET MAUI in Action

1 Introducing .NET MAUI

This chapter covers

• What .NET MAUI is
• How MAUI fits into .NET
• Why you would use .NET MAUI to build desktop and mobile apps
• Writing cross-platform UIs

.NET MAUI is here, and if you’re reading this book, you already know a thing or two about it. But how does it work, and how did we get here? In this chapter, we look at the architecture of .NET MAUI and get an overview of how it works. We also see how to use it to build cross-platform mobile and desktop apps. To begin, let’s look at the history of cross-platform development and see how .NET MAUI is the fulfilment of a dream at Microsoft over 20 years in the making.

1.1 How did we get here?

The dream of write once, run anywhere (WORA) cross-platform software began in earnest ...