Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Microsoft sunsets Xamarin toolkit

news
Jul 22, 20212 mins

With .NET MAUI due to arrive in November 2021, Microsoft announced it would end updates to the Xamarin mobile app development platform in November 2022.

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Credit: Life of Pix

With Microsoft’s .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) cross-platform framework due later this year, serving as the next generation of Xamarin Forms, the company announced plans to sunset its Xamarin Community Toolkit for mobile development.

Microsoft said it will issue service releases of Xamarin Community Toolkit until November 2022, and pull requests for bug fixes will be accepted until that time. Pull requests for adding new features will be accepted until September. Meanwhile, .NET MAUI is set for general availability in November 2021.

A preview of the Xamarin successor, .NET MAUI Community Toolkit, is planned for release in August via NuGet packages. Work is ongoing to port features from the Xamarin Community Toolkit to .NET MAUI. Going forward, the .NET MAUI toolkit will be the recommended toolkit for all .NET MAUI apps.

To help avoid breaking changes when porting Xamarin.Forms apps to .NET MAUI, two .NET MAUI-compatible versions of Xamarin Community Toolkit will be released. These “MauiCompat” NuGet packages, due in August, will be nearly identical to the current Xamarin Community Toolkit libraries, the only difference being the Xamarin.Forms dependency to .NET MAUI. The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit will debut in a new GitHub repo, where Microsoft will combine it with efforts from the Windows Community Toolkit team.

Downloaded more than 250,000 times, the Xamarin Community Toolkit provides reusable elements for mobile development with Xamarin.Forms including animations, behaviors, converters, and effects. It has served to simplify common developer tasks when building for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Universal Windows Platform apps using Xamarin.Forms.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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