Author Archives: billreiss

What’s the next big thing in tech right now?

Ok I’m taking a little break from the development articles for this one that’s more fun. What is the next big thing in technology right now? Clearly the answer is OpenAI and Generative AI overall. However, I’ve been seeing some posts about advancements in another technology that is very important. Maybe not to the level… Read More »

A Workaround for GIF issues in .NET MAUI

I have been having issues getting a GIF to animate consistently in iOS and Android using the Image control in MAUI. There are open issues on this, but in the meantime, hopefully this solution will meet your needs. On Windows, GIF images in an Image control work as expected. I tried several workarounds many of… Read More »

Printing a PDF from .NET MAUI Windows Silently

I had a request recently to print PDFs from .NET MAUI specifically on Windows Desktop. They also had the need to not display a print dialog, and just print to the default printer. This isn’t nearly as easy as it would seem, and there is a lot of conflicting information online about it. I tried… Read More »

Which version of .NET MAUI should I be using?

Here we are in September of 2023 and it may not be obvious whether you should be using the stable version of Visual Studio or the preview version. Also, things have become a bit more complicated with the announcement that Visual Studio for Mac is in maintenance mode and will go away eventually. First of… Read More »

Templated Controls in .NET MAUI

Let’s say you want a custom control in .NET MAUI where the look and feel can be completely described in XAML and doesn’t require any platform specific rendering. You can easily do this using a ContentView. If you Add New Item, you can choose a .NET MAUI ContentView (XAML). And this will generate a XAML… Read More »

Accessing Xamarin Forms App Properties in .NET MAUI

There were two primary ways to store preferences in Xamarin Forms. You could use either App Properties or Xamarin Essentials Preferences. Both are similar, with key/value pairs that are stored somewhere that the application can access, but private to the application. You could remember a username, store application preferences like colors and other customizations, and… Read More »

.NET MAUI Release Delayed to 2022

Good news and not so good news. First the good news. A new Preview for .NET MAUI became available on September 14, 2021. There are several changes, with the most important being that MAUI is now integrated into the workload installer (as an optional package under the Mobile Development workload) and you can now create… Read More »