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Xamarin Deprecation Impacts?

#1

I saw recently that Microsoft is going to deprecate Xamarin, mostly affecting Xamarin.Forms, releasing a new thing called MAUI to replace it. Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android will officially become part of .NET as “.NET for iOS” and “.NET for Android”… basically nothing code-wise will change apparently for these. This is all supposed to begin around November 2021, and be part of the .NET 6 release.

I was wondering if there will be any impact to the ThinkGeo Xamarin packages with these changes. I’m guessing updates will occur when the time comes?

Personally my app is a Xamarin.iOS app and uses MapSuite packages.

#2

Hey @Doug_Cumbie,

Looks like you are referring to this article. From what the article says, it seems like the upgrade will be straightforward when we move to implement support for .NET 6 (which we are really excited for). But there is that concern of backwards compatibility and the ambiguity of what extent of changes need to be made to ensure performance.

While we don’t have everything completely planned out on our part, we take caution in making sure we support older frameworks. I expect that we will create new packages for MAUI/.NET6 where necessary and still maintain Xamarin packages. We don’t want to leave anyone behind on updates and bug fixes for ThinkGeo Xamarin.

Are you looking to upgrade your application to .NET 6 using MAUI when it releases?

Thanks,
Kyle

#3

Yep, that’s the article I was referencing. In my case, we’re in no real rush to update to .NET 6. We’d probably do so when things are stable and when you have your libraries updated to support .NET 6 as well. So I mentioned our app doesn’t use Xamarin.Forms, so we won’t need to transition to MAUI. We use the native Xamarin.iOS libs, and from the article, it sounds like that will just be moved into the underlying unified .NET that version 6 bring.

Sounds like there’s still a good deal of time before these changes take place: .NET 6 is planned for November 2021, with support for Xamarin.Forms extending another year to 2022. Other than that I it sounds like ideally, we’d just be doing nuget package updates, with some possible extra code changes on our end.

#4

Hey @Doug_Cumbie,

Yeah, we are also waiting on stability with .NET 6 before going too deep into development with it.

Okay, well I don’t think you have anything to worry about with ThinkGeo’s Xamarin iOS packages. We will still be supporting them in the future.

Thanks,
Kyle