NET MAUI in .NET 8 Preview 5 is available and contains bug fixes and performance improvements for cross-platform application development. It includes changes to iOS keyboard scrolling, test improvements, performance enhancements to the {Binding} mechanism and Android label layout. The announcement provoked different reactions in the community.
Visual Studio 2022 on Windows offers .NET 8 platform previews and the .NET MAUI preview workload. In order to access them, it is necessary to download version 17.7 Preview 2, select the .NET Multi-platform Application UI workload and enable the optional '.NET MAUI (.NET 8 Preview)' component. For macOS users, it is recommended to download the .NET 8 preview 5 installer and install .NET MAUI using the command line.
For upgrading a .NET MAUI platform project to version 8.0.0-preview.5.8506, it is necessary to first install the .NET 8 platform SDK in the preview version. Then proceed to update the .NET MAUI NuGet packages within the project. It is possible to use Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac to manage the NuGet packages or manually modify the project file.
The announcement blog post sparked a lengthy discussion in the comments. Eder Cardoso wrote that all of these fixes were supposed to be on .NET 7 releases. David Ortinau, a principal product manager at Microsoft, answered:
Hi Eder, I hear you and wish we could ship all the fixes to all the versions. We are optimizing for fixing the most impactful issues and that means limiting the most all of our focus to ensuring .NET 8 is the best possible release.
Then, Eder Cardoso replied:
All bug fixes matter David. Bug fixes are what matters the most for us as .NET MAUI developers.
Please change this bug fix merge and delivery policy/process. Bugs damage the framework’s image a lot, especially for those who are touching MAUI for the very first time.
Jens Jahrig added:
Definitely, these fixes should have been in .NET 7.
The team does the same fairytale every year “everything will be so awesome with the next major release (5,6,7,8,9,10), we fixed so many bugs”.
But we always get a current broken version and a next version which fixes one thing and breaks another.
I see no positive change in this scheme in the last few years.
These questions and concerns show that developers are not satisfied with the development of the framework. Working with the .NET MAUI is challenging due to the number of bugs.
A full list of changes can be found in the release notes.