Summary  
The chapter introduces a cross-platform UI framework that lets you define interfaces in XAML and implement application logic in C#, enabling a single codebase to run on multiple desktop and mobile platforms.

General domain of usage  
Cross-platform desktop and mobile application development

**MAUI**, also known as **Multi-Platform App UI**, is a powerful **cross-platform** framework for creating mobile and desktop applications using **C#**. 

There are multiple options when it comes to developing desktop applications using C#, for example, using the **Windows Forms (WF)** library, or the more advanced **Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)**. However, **WF** and **WPF** are somewhat older as compared to **MAUI**, moreover, **WF** and **WPF** only support application development for **Windows**, however, with **MAUI**, it is possible to create desktop applications for all popular platforms: **Windows**, **Mac**, and **Linux**. Apart from that, it is also possible to create applications for **Android** and **iOS** using **MAUI**. 

Since **MAUI** applications are **cross-platform**, an app created for **Windows** can be exported to be runnable on **MacOS**, or even for **Android** and **iOS**, without making any changes to the code. This makes **MAUI** very robust. 


**MAUI** is built with cross-platform compatibility as one of its important goals which allows us to make applications for multiple different platforms using a single codebase; however, in some rare cases, we might need to write platform-specific code to make it fully compatible with a specific platform.

Note

This is why we will be using **MAUI** to develop **Desktop Applications**. We will also cover some important C# concepts along the way as we learn to develop some cool desktop applications.

**If you are on MacOS**, certain procedures might be different for you, for example creating a new project or running the application. However, you should be able to follow the tutorial without any issues, as in such cases I will have the alternate method mentioned in the tutorials.

In **MAUI**, we define the application's UI (User Interface) using **XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language)** and program the functionality and logic of the application using **C#**. 

**XAML** is a **Markup Language** that has a very similar syntax to **HTML**, which is very convenient as we can define the structure and components of our application using **XAML** similar to how we would define the structure and components of a web page using **HTML**.

A **Markup Language** is a system of annotating a document using tags and symbols, to describe its structure and presentation. The most popular markup language is HTML which is used for defining how elements appear on web pages.

What is the limitation of Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation?

What does MAUI stand for in terms of .NET?

In this course, we will learn about some advanced C# concepts along with MAUI, which is an application development library. We will learn how to create some interesting GUI applications while keeping them quick and responsive using techniques like Threading. We will make applications that will interact user input and APIs, and apart from that, we will cover some important C# concepts like Reflection and Generics. This course will further improve our programming skills and will give us a strong foundation to move forward towards Web Development.

In this section, we will learn what MAUI is, and how to set up a .NET MAUI application. We will also look at the structure of an MAUI application, and in the end, we will learn how to add some basic elements to our UI. This section will prepare us for the rest of the course where we will be working with more practical concepts.

In this section we will learn about delegates, events and data binding. Using this knowledge we will learn how to make interesting interactive GUI applications.

In this section, we will learn what Threading is and how to use it to keep our applications responsive, and run smoothly while performing resource intensive tasks. We will see how to differs from other similar concepts on C# and what are good practices when implementing Threading in our application. There will also be some interesting tasks to help us in understand this concept on a deeper level.

In this section, we will learn how to make more robust methods, classes and other objects which can work multiple types of input data types, by first learning about Generics and how to implement generic classes, then we will move on to Reflection and how to use reflection for further improving the capabilities of our programs.

What is .NET MAUI?

1. What is the limitation of Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation?

2. What does MAUI stand for in terms of .NET?