XamExpertDay 2021 Recap

XamExpertDay 2021 took place on 1st October with a great line-up of speakers and interesting topics for Xamarin and .Net MAUI developers. Organised by Gerald Versluis who you probably know from Channel 9 and his awesome YouTube videos, Kerry Lothrop who you may know from the excellent DevTalk podcast, Tobias Hoppenthaler and Glenn Versweyveld, this was the fifth year of XamExpertDay and the second event to be completely virtual. Unfortunately I've never attended a XamExpertDay in-person but I watched a livestream a few years ago and was immediately impressed. This is a conference that specialises in deep-dive content and real-life scenarios presented by experienced members of the community, and the 2021 event was no exception.

There were 15 sessions from 17 speakers on the day. I was only able to watch a few sessions live but fortunately Gerald has posted them all on his YouTube channel. If you can only watch one session make it Maddy Ledger's closing keynote from the end of the day. If you have more time then must-see sessions include Charlin & Rendy's UX session, Mark's session on Authentication and Allan Ritchie talking about background services and Bluetooth Low Energy. I haven't watched Rachel Kang's session about the new Accessibility features in .Net MAUI because I recently saw her present that topic elsewhere but if you're writing MAUI apps it will be another must-see session.

XamExpertDay 2021 was a great conference and I look forward to what next year brings for the event - a new name? an in-person event? Whatever the team plan for 2022, I'm sure it will be fun and educational and I hope to see you there.

Adding Authentication to your Mobile App

Mark Allibone

Adding Authentication to your app can be intimidating. Mark shows us how to implement authentication using the OpenID Connect & OAuth standards and how to keep the user authenticated without repeatedly asking for credentials.

Building a mobile game with Xamarin.Forms

Shaun Lawrence

Shaun shows us how he built a wordsearch game for Android and iOS with Xamarin.Forms. He explores some of the key elements of the game, how he used SkiaSharp and Lottie for a better user experience and trade-offs made to improve performance.

Creating PDF files in mobile apps with PdfSharpCore and MigraDocCore

Luis Beltran

Luis shows us how to create complicated PDF documents including paragraphs, tables, styles and images in our Xamarin apps using open source .Net libraries PDFsharp and MigraDoc.

There's more to Xamarin than UI, let's do some background magic with Shiny .Net

Allan Ritchie

Shiny 2.0 makes working with background tasks and device services easy. Allan shows us how to set up Shiny in our app, do basic background jobs and takes a look at what else Shiny has to offer.

Porting your Custom Renderer to a Handler

Pedro Jesus

.Net MAUI has a new architecture, replacing Custom Renderers with Handlers. Pedro shows us how to migrate our Renderers to Handlers and take advantage of the improved architecture.

MVVM vs MVU

Sam Basu

Sam explores two popular design patterns that you can use with .Net MAUI – MVVM and MVU. How much of the design pattern is open to interpretation? How much is baked in? When to bring in other frameworks? And, the state of the ecosystem.

Building Your Next .Net MAUI App

David Ortinau

In this introductory session, David shows us how to get started building a new app for Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows using .Net MAUI.

Raspberry-Pi Hand Sanitizer controlled by Mobile Apps

Saamer Mansoor

Saamer demonstrates how to set up a Raspberry Pi so that it can be controlled from a Xamarin or .Net MAUI app and used to control an IoT device. If you love getting out your soldering iron and building hardware, this is a great session to watch.

Drawn Controls in .Net MAUI

Javier Suárez Ruiz

In this session Javier demonstrates .Net MAUI Graphics, a new cross-platform graphics library included with .Net MAUI and how to use it to create fully drawn custom controls.

An introduction to modern desktop app development with .Net and MAUI

Konrad Müller

Konrad shows us the desktop development updates .Net MAUI will bring and other modern ways to develop for desktop with .Net: UWP, WPF, Mac Catalyst, Blazor, PWAs and more. Desktop apps used to be my bread and butter but I've not worked on one for a while, this session helped get me up to date on the options available.

From WPF to MAUI: Porting a web server based GUI

Daniele Fontani, Andrea Marcelli

Daniele and Andrea show us how they ported a WPF Windows application to .Net MAUI, the open source app manager JSOS. They demonstrate all the steps to update the project, the compatibility issues they encountered and how they solved them.

Improving the UX of our Xamarin Forms Apps

Charlin Agramonte, Rendy Del Rosario

User experience is one of the most important considerations when developing a mobile app. In this packed session, Charlin and Rendy show us how to improve the UX of our Xamarin.Forms apps with loads of useful tips and techniques. This is a must-see session for all Xamarin and .Net MAUI developers.

Building Accessible Apps with .Net MAUI

Rachel Kang

Rachel shows us how to build accessible apps more easily than before by leveraging new APIs in .Net MAUI.

MAUI Blazor - One App that runs everywhere

Jose Javier Columbie

.Net MAUI enables us to host Blazor components in our cross-platform native apps. In this introductory session, Jose covers everything you need to get your MAUI Blazor app running everywhere: Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Closing Keynote: Hello, .Net MAUI Expert Day!

Maddy Leger

In an emotional session to end the day, Maddy takes a look back on some of the major highlights of the past decade of Xamarin and shares her vision for the future of .Net.