Microsoft is revealing plans for the future of its Xamarin Community Toolkit as the .NET MAUI release nears. This year the company has been working to unify Xamarin SDKs into .NET, and it released .NET MAUI as an evolution of Xamarin.Forms with the ultimate goal of acting as a replacement. 

Included in the plans is info about the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit, a backwards-compatible version of the Xamarin Community Toolkit, and the sunsetting of the current version of the toolkit.

The .NET MAUI Community Toolkit is nearing release. Microsoft will be releasing two NuGet packages for it: CommunityToolit.Maui and CommunityToolkit.Maui.Markup. It is planning to release the first preview of these packages in August.

The team is currently in the process of bringing features from the Xamarin Community Toolkit to the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit. Microsoft recommends the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit as the toolkit for all .NET MAUI apps.

Microsoft will also be releasing two .NET MAUI-compatible versions of the Xamarin Community Toolkit to help developers avoid breaking changes when porting Xamarin.Forms apps to .NET MAUI. According to the company, these will be almost identical to the current Xamarin Community Toolkit libraries, with the only difference being a change in the Xamarin.Forms dependency to .NET MAUI.

In terms of sunsetting the Xamarin Community Toolkit, the company will continue to support it through November 2022. It will accept pull requests for bug fixes throughout time, but it will only accept pull requests to add new features through September 2021.

“Thank you to all of the amazing contributors to Xamarin Community Toolkit! We could not have created such a successful library without your help, and we can’t wait to see the amazing new features you’ll add to the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit,” Brandon Minnick, developer advocate for developer relations at Microsoft, wrote in a post.