MAUI day 2024
- 4 minsThis season’s business bumble well and truly peaked with Friday’s MAUI day. It’s a single-track, DotNet MAUI focused conference, hosted at the Microsoft office in Cologne. But it was a conference that didn’t quite feel like a conference. The vibe was lovely.
Intimate. Personal. Informal.
As it should be.
It was an event where you could chat with anyone in the room, including the speakers, with no one bringing their heirs and graces. All too often, conferences are so large that you’re lost in the crowd and don’t get the chance to make any meaningful connections.
That’s not to say the speakers were lacking. They all brought their A-game.
David Ortinau started the day with an overview of the current state of play for MAUI. David covered what’s to come in the future with .NET 9.0, as well as highlighting a few of the easy-to-miss changes within the official ecosystem. Along the way, I got to learn a few titbits that solve some recent minor headaches, as well as a heads-up to sidestep a few more on the project Horizon. David’s presentation style was perfect given the very early start time, easing the audience into the day. Most importantly, we now know he’s the canary in the coal mine for upgrades for Mac-based developers.
Dan Ardelean dove into app security in a really engaging way. Throughout the talk, Dan introduced us to a bunch of concepts to be aware of when building our apps, whether using MAUI or not. A couple of them were explored in a little more depth, along with a brief walk through of how to explore the topics for ourselves, accompanied by the tools to do so. Out of all the sessions, this is the one that I took the most actionable notes during. It’s a topic I’ve only ever glanced at, but now feel confident in having some solid starting points to learn from.
Maddy Montaquila saw us home in true Maddy style, with a whistle stop tour of Aspire. Whilst the demos didn’t quite work, the Aspire awesomeness shone through regardless. This is a tool I’d heard of, but not yet taken the time to explore. It turns out that it’s pretty awesome. . . even if a little lacking in MAUI support at the moment. I can see the team around me finding it very useful, given they have an ecosystem of products to maintain.
As a speaker, Maddy was exactly as awesome as I’d hoped, which was energetic, inspiring, and informative. Most importantly, she was the perfect pick me up at the end of the day and showed that if you keep rolling when the demo gods aren’t smiling down on you, everything will work out.
I’d be remiss to not mention the other speakers. Damian Antonowicz gave a really good overview of the upgrade process the team at Demant went through in migrating a huge app from Xamarin to MAUI. In a conversation later in the day, he turned out to be the first person I’ve spoken to whose spoken highly of SAFE and made it seem beneficial. A refreshing change! Sweekriti Satpathy shared some DevOps love, highlighting a few things I’d missed when digging through the docs 🙏. It turns out you can do a lot with dotnet publish! Mark Allibone showed off his Bluetooth x MAUI project, unwittingly demonstrating why you should never update a project just before stepping onto the stage! Regardless, the session was really valuable in highlighting the potential to incorporate meaningful JavaScript projects into MAUI thanks to additions coming in .NET 9.0.
Overall, it was a great day.
It was wonderful to rub shoulders with the people whose tools I’ve been using over the past year, videos I’ve watched, and tutorials I’ve followed. And that was just amongst the audience! It was also cathartic to chat over lunch about challenges faced when working with MAUI. Although things have smoothed out massively in recent iterations, there have been many pain points along this learning journey. It was great to find out that I’m not the problem. . . for once.
A special shout-out goes to Max Mannstein for making me feel super welcome in a foreign land, and teaching me conference German 101. It was his first conference, one attended as a university student. . . and we all remember how that felt. Intimidating! After coaching and teaching hundreds, if not thousands, of students over the years, it’s easy to spot the ones that are moving on to big things. Like and subscribe to him (and Gerald 🤣) on YouTube now, before he gets snowed under by the weight of the community that will invariably build up.
Lastly, thanks to the team for organising the day and for including me in it. I suspect this will be one of the reoccurring reasons for an amble towards Köln on a semi regular basis. I’m looking forward to the next trip already.
Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland. Du warst großartig!