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.