Announcing the .NET MAUI Beautiful UI Challenge

Jon Galloway

Update: Entries extended until September 30th, 2022!

.NET MAUI doesn’t just enable you to create cross-platform applications on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android… it helps you to do it with style! You can create beautiful apps that delight your users, using great built-in features, native controls, and community libraries.

We’re big fans of both Snppts and the .NET MAUI Good Looking UI Samples repo because they showcase the best of what the community is doing to build beautiful .NET MAUI UI. During the month of August, anyone who contributes to either of these community repos will get a sweet sticker pack from the .NET team!

Snppts

Snppts is a community-run website helping aggregate beautiful .NET MAUI UI snippets for and from the community. We’ve been big fans for years, we ran a Snppts community challenge back in 2019! When you’re building a .NET MAUI app and looking for either some inspiration or some reusable UI components to drop into your app… or even better, you’ve built some amazing UI you’d like to share… think of Snppts!

.NET MAUI Good Looking UI Samples

Javier has been leading the charge in beautiful Xamarin.Forms apps for years with his Xamarin.Forms Goodlooking UI repo, and now he and the community are building out a .NET MAUI Good Looking UI repo. While Snppts is a showcase for reusable components, .NET MAUI Good Looking UI is a showcase for complete applications.

.NET MAUI Good Looking UI site screenshot

Looking for some inspiration? You can start by implementing some top mobile UI designs in .NET MAUI, or by porting some of the existing Xamarin.Forms Good Looking UI examples to .NET MAUI.

Submit your samples and get a sticker pack

Share your beautiful design with Snppts .or .NET MAUI Good Looking UI (or both!) and we’ll send you a sticker pack! Here’s all you have to do:

  1. Submit a pull request to Snppts or .NET MAUI Good Looking UI.
  2. Fill out a short form (links in the repos) to tell us about your experience and where to send the stickers by August 31.
  3. Put the cool stickers on your things!

Laptop with .NET MAUI stickers

Top submissions get famous on the .NET blog and On .NET Shows

Everyone’s a winner, but we’ll also be looking for some standouts to feature on the blog and our On .NET recap:

  • Best overall application
  • Best use of new APIs (shadows, borders, etc.)
  • Best responsive application (works well at different device sizes)
  • Best incorporation of native UI features

Eligibility

To be eligible to be selected:

  • You must submit a valid PR that is accepted and fill out the entry form.
  • Giveaway is open to residents of countries and localities where USPS can deliver.
  • Giveaway is open to those who are 18 years of age or older.
  • Entries must be submitted by September 30th, 2022 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Summary

We can’t wait to see your submissions! Build some beautiful UI with .NET MAUI, and share it at Snppts and .NET MAUI Good Looking UI!

15 comments

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  • Angius 0

    Is styling MAUI sane compared to WPF/UWP? Or does it still require 6324 lines of XAML code with 754 levels of nesting to make a button turn red on hover?

    • Salar Khalilzadeh 0

      Hover visual state is not supported 😄🤕

      • Angius 0

        Even worse than I thought, then, lmao

        • Faheem Ahmad 0

          Agree, also literally 90 percent less tutorial than swift ui or flutter

          • Yunus Emre AYGÃœN 0

            Uhh… What? SwiftUI is released in 2019 and Flutter is released in 2017. Meanwhile, .NET MAUI is just 1 week old.

  • Samuel Egger 0

    Can I buy these .NET stickers somewhere?

  • Ryan Graham 0

    This is a great contest and I can’t wait to see the contributions. Although not it wasn’t restricted to “good looking UI,” Matt Goldman organized the very successful #MAUIUIJuly:

    https://goforgoldman.com/2022/05/19/maui-ui-july.html

  • hitesh davey 2

    Where is the state-of-the-art WYSIWYG designer to build MAUI UI? This is more of a challenge to write a XAML script than to design UI!

    • d3n0 0

      React Native, Flutter have no WYSIWYG designers either.

      • gambler4882@yahoo.com 1

        And thats why we are waiting the Microsoft to be ahead of the curve, and make RAD as it once was 🙂 “Developers, developers, developers…” 🙂 remember? The fact that other do not have something, wont bring people back to our tools. I heard some people don’t even like using debuggers, they are loging the lines to debug, does that realy make them better devs?

        • Andrew Fielden 1

          And it also doesn’t attract new developers. Coming from the Java/Android world, I’ve gotten used to have a superb IDE, with built-in UI designer, complete with drag and drop component building.
          The absence of such an important coding tool makes me want to stick with Android Studio. And then I may as well learn XCode, if my company will shell out for a Mac.

      • hitesh davey 4

        Who is stopping you to continue using the script editor if you want to do your job your way? Btw, you can still use a notepad and get your job done. But the question is will you do so?

        Here I am talking about the “Visual” element of Visual Studio (not “Scripting” Studio). VS is all about productivity. Today if I want something done quickly in windows app development I simply use Winform or WPF designer to design my whole idea without much bothering about behind the seen. Likewise, developers will be more productive if a pixel-perfect WYSIWYG unified designer tool is available for the MAUI/BLAZOR/ASP.net core projects.

        A WYSIWYG designer is all about productivity (you get to see everything at design time rather than at runtime and no need to play around with hot reload for every change you want in a final design).

        • Andrew Fielden 2

          I totally agree! I just this weekend started looking at .NET MAUI to build an Android/iOS app. After going through some tutorials, and being fairly impressed, I looked for the WYSIWYG editor, that I had always taken for granted in Android Studio.
          It’s not there!!!
          What’s going on Microsoft?! You’ve designed this super cross platform mobile app builder, but forgot to include probably THE most important component for designing a UI based application. I mean who wants to manually construct masses of XAML, or XML, whatever it is you call it?
          I expect the editor to provide a code view and an interactive UI designer, with drag and drop components from an available palette.
          Come on please! I’ve gone from loving this, to practically hating it in the space of 5 minutes.

  • Coder Basket 0

    You can submit .Net Maui challenge here… All .Net Types can also search. No need to fork.
    https://coderbasket.github.io/

  • Jan SeriÅ¡ 3

    Developers need WYSIWYG visual designer for MAUI, not stickers.

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