Setting up your Mac for .NET MAUI in 2023

Photo by Turag Photography on Unsplash

Introduction

MAUI, short for Multi platform Application User Interface, is the evolution and simplificiation of a multitude of solutions which were previously used to create cross platform mobile and desktop applications with .NET (few of those being the various targets of Xamarin like Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS; Windows UWP, Windows Presentation Foundation, Tizen.NET, etc.)

You’ll find all the details here — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui. I don’t see a reason to explain everything in this post, but the gist being it’s a more modern and simplified experience but still familiar to the seasoned C#/Xamarin developers.

The Setup

There are two clear paths that atleast I see, in terms of the setup and I have a clear preference. But I’ll talk about both of them.

Note: I have an Intel based Mac so things might be different compared to an M1 based machine. I’m still trying to upgrade, and when I do, I’ll write another article covering the differences.

The Visual Studio way

If you’re coming with a Xamarin/UWP/WPF background, most likely you’d want to use Visual Studio for Mac to get things going. The setup is quite straight forward, you just install VS for…