MAUI Day UK 2025
- 5 minsThey say to never meet your heroes.
But MAUI heroes are a bit different. They don’t wear capes for starters!
But they often fequent a purple hoodie!
Today’s .NET MAUI Day was amazing.
The audience turned up in their droves, descending from four (Yes. FOUR!) continents to join us in London. The speakers traversed Europe to deliver fantastic sessions at their own expense. And the global pool of supportive sponsors made it all possible.
With a room filled with the great and the good in the MAUI world, how could it be anything except awesome!
David Ortinau started the day in style with a look ahead at what’s to come in the world of MAUI. Quite a lot as it turns out, with a strong focus on performance and stability of the platform. . . which was music to our collective ears. Just like last year’s Cologne gathering, it eased the room gently into the day and set the tone of it being a smorgasbord of cross-platform delight.
Jean-Marie instilled the confidence to animate all the things. This is something that can be daunting to consider, but it turns out it’s a lot simpler than one might imagine. As a historically web focused developer, it was nice to discover it’s strikingly similar to CSS!
Matt Lacey encouraged us to rethink our collective relationship with XAML. It’s verbose, unwieldy, and error prone. But it doesn’t have to be. Check out the MAUI App Accelerator, the RapidXAML Toolkit and eagerly await Enamel! I know that the collection of tooling demoed throughout the talk will be slipped into my dev setup in due course, and I’m sure the same is true for many others in the room.
Rogier van der Hee and Norman Mackay shared some stories from the trenches. They’ve ported multiple low level apps from Xamarin to MAUI, and delivered a session with lots of tidbits and tips. Knowing how many attendees in the room are about to undergo the same transition, this is a talk that was sure to be super useful to the group.
Thanks to Mark Allibone, our collective debugging and logging skills have been elevated to a new level. Serilog offers a fantastic way to get errors out of our apps in a useful way, with the talk suggesting a whole bunch of tooling that plays nicely with it. This is one to go back and watch. . . oh wait. Hopefully it’ll be recorded at another conf one day.
Whilst every session was far above par, my personal highlight of the conf was the talk by Guy.
Accessibility is a hugely important area of development, and one that we should all be putting more effort into doing well. It is literally life changing for swathes of the population who use assistive technology. Knowing some of the projects represented in the room are used on a daily basis to help us interface with the modern world, my hope is that more of them will be usable by even more people moving forward.
Thankfully, MAUI makes it straightforward. Start with SemanticProperties.Description on all the things and iterate from there based on testing.
It’s hard to pick a single favourite moment from the day, but the most meaningful photo on my camera roll by is a selfie with Max.
Nice one for making it my friend. I knew you’d figure it out 🙌
Massive thank you to the folks at Syncfusion, Progress, Sentry, UX Divers, JetBrains, and Just Eat. Without you all, the day wouldn’t have happened. You accommodated, fed, and gifted ~100 .NET MAUI developers with food, swag, and a smattering of prizes. We will forever be grateful!
Lastly, a special shoutout goes to my fellow conf organisers. Sean, Cliff, Matt, and Carl. Whislt there wasn’t a cape in sight, we still managed to pull off something special, inadvertently giving ourselves a big problem in the process.
How will we top this next year!
A welcome challenge, but a one nonetheless.
Thankfully, it is the Cologne team’s problem to wrestle with first.
With the event done, my imposter syndrome can start to subside.
All throughout organising the conf, I’ve been working alongside the people I’ve looked up to ever since starting on my MAUI development journey. They created the tutorials, wrote the books, and made the videos that have helped me improve my skills along the way. It’s not been a smooth journey, but they certainly helped level out the majority of bumps and navigate around others. Thank you for putting your trust in a guy who randomly messaged you one day 🙏
Now everything is over, I’m gonna enjoy the rest of this recharge visit to the seaside.
Phew. That’s better.
Over to you Tobias, Glenn, Stephen, Kerry, and Gerald. See you in Cologne later in the year.
Xam Expert. . . errm. . . MAUI Day Alaaf!
Originally featured on LinkedIn.