On November 15th, 2023, Microsoft announced version 7.0.0 of their open-source MAUI Community Toolkit. The new version adds support for .NET 8 and brings several bug fixes.
.NET MAUI Community Toolkit (NMCT) is one of Microsoft’s .NET community toolkits hosted on GitHub, covering the MAUI developers. Their purpose is to let the community contribute useful code missing from official frameworks. The community toolkits are released as open-source software, and they encourage the developers to submit their contributions. Some toolkit additions can be later promoted into the official Microsoft libraries.
MAUI is an acronym that stands for Multiplatform Application UI. According to Microsoft, it’s an evolution of Xamarin and Xamarin Forms frameworks, unifying separate target libraries and projects into a single project for multiple devices. Currently, MAUI supports writing applications that run on Android 5+, iOS 11+, macOS 10.15+, Samsung Tizen, Windows 10 version 1809+, or Windows 11.
An updated version of NMCT was released the day after the .NET 8 official launch, as it happened with the launch of .NET 7 in 2022. Version 7.0.0 of the toolkit brings support for .NET 8, as expected. It was followed by an update with version number 7.0.1 in December 2023.
The new features in the new toolkit version are small enhancements instead of big features. For example, adding support for using the platform-native UNUserNotificationCenter when running on iOS 17 or higher. On Android 29 or lower, there was an issue when determining the height of the status bar for correct text wrapping. This issue is now fixed. Following Microsoft’s recommended best practices for asynchronous code handling in .NET, all methods in the toolkit that return a Task or a ValueTask now also allow for passing a CancellationToken parameter to propagate a task cancellation.
Several dependency versions were updated. One direct dependency for Samsung Tizen (SkiaSharp 2D graphics library) was removed because it was a stop-gap fix for a security vulnerability of an older library version being indirectly referenced. As Tizen's official UI extension package upon which NMCT is now updated to use a safe version of SkiaSharp, the direct dependency is no longer needed for the toolkit.
The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is versioned in different releases. In 2023, the versions grew from 3.1.0 in January to 7.0.0 in November. The reason for this multiplicity of version numbers is the presence of breaking changes, which force a major version number increase.
The updated documentation for the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is available on the Microsoft Learn website. The project repository is hosted on GitHub and currently has 90 open issues.