On March 29th, 2024, Microsoft released version 8.0.0 of their open-source MAUI Community Toolkit. The new version adds touch animation behavior, a rewritten Snackbar component and many 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.
The previous major version of NMCT, 7.0.0, was launched concurrently with the .NET 8 official launch, in November 2023. The version 8.0.0 comes four months later.
The big new feature in the new version is the availability of TouchBehavior. It is a declarative ability to interact with a visual element, based on a touch or a mouse event. In the Xamarin cross-platform library, deprecated and with the official end of life slated for May 1st 2024 , it was known as TouchEffect. The NCMT team ported it from the Xamarin Comunity Toolkit to the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit.
Another change is the Snackbar component, which represents a notification on the lower edge of the screen. It has been completely rewritten. For Windows developers, there is a breaking change that requires component preparation in the package.xappmanifest file and the MauiAppBuilder class. Other platforms don’t require any additional steps.
The navigation bar on the Android platform now supports changing the color and the light/dark style.
Among the rest of the fixes in this release, there are several regarding the Popup control: fixing the size and position on Android, gesture support for size change on iOS, and fixing the active window popup detection on Windows.
The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is versioned in different releases, frequently updated. The toolkit versions evolved from 3.1.0 in January 2023 to 8.0.0 in March 2024. The reason for this multiplicity of version numbers is the presence of breaking changes, which force a major version number increase. Microsoft acknowledged the progress and the acceptance of the toolkit with a mention on their .NET developer blog.
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 108 open issues.
