.NET MAUI 11 Preview 4: CoreCLR, Badges, and C# in XAML

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]This one feature that you've been asking for since the Xamarin Forms times has now been implemented in.NET MAUI 11 preview 4. Which one that is? Let's go see in this video.

[00:00:15]>> [music] >> It feels like just yesterday that we were talking about.NET MAUI 11 preview 3. So, that is.NET MAUI on.NET 11. And.NET preview 3 brought a lot of cool new things, right? Lots of maps improvements, clustering, clicking on polygon, all that kind of cool stuff, long press gesture. Oh my goodness, finally. Go check out the video in the video description below or just one wait until the end of the video and the link will automatically take you there. Go check that out, but not until you check out this video about preview 4 which brings another cool set of improvements as well that you can look forward to to whenever.NET 11 is going to be launched in November of 2026. So, what are some of the new things? Well, let just switch over to my screen right here and I've got the release notes open to just walk you through it and then I have a little bit of a demo to show you the actual features in an actual app as well. Um one of the big ones that you hopefully won't really notice, let me maybe even zoom this in a little bit more for you, is Core CLR runtime by default. There's a whole whole history there. Core CLR is kind of like the runtime that most of the.NET uses the.NET ecosystem uses.

[00:01:23]There was Mono once upon a time which is the open source implementation of the.NET framework back when it wasn't open source yet. And that is what kind of like Xamarin used and later.NET MAUI used. And I posted this on the socials.

[00:01:36]Go follow me there if you don't do that yet. And a lots of people were surprised about.NET MAUI still running on Mono and not on Core CLR. So, I like to think that that is because we did a pretty good job of hiding that for you. It should not be something that you should care about. And if you don't know what this is about, don't really worry about it. Ideally, this is not one of those very glamorous changes um that, you know, you will notice hopefully because everything should work exactly the same, but now suddenly our.NET MAUI apps your.NET MAUI apps are running on Core CLR, which means you get access to all the debugging tools, the profiling tools, etc. etc. that are, you know, just standard in the.NET ecosystem. There might be a little bit work to make them work for um the mobile stack as well, but it's coming, right?

[00:02:24]On top of like performance um improvements, all the things there. So, lots of good things coming. Uh Material 3, I've got another video on that as well.

[00:02:32]Go check the links down below in the video description. Uh Material 3 for Android, of course, your Android apps built with.NET MAUI. We are working hard to get all the controls uh Material 3 ready, and uh we're doing more of that in.NET 11 as well. Xcode directive, I'll show you that in a little bit.

[00:02:49]Compiled bindings inside of data templates..NET watch for Android and for iOS. So,.NET watch is kind of like the um terminal version of hot reload.

[00:02:58]You can now do.NET watch and on your Android and your iOS projects, and now you will see the changes um being made on your running app while you're actually working on them and the app is running on your device or simulator, right? Monochrome file support for Android adaptive icons. Android also has like a theming now in um um Android operating system that allows you to kind of like have themed icons on your home screen. Um now you have the option in your.NET MAUI app to specify a monochrome file um so that it will all look nicely on your user's phone. Now, one of the things that is not shown here um is I I think it's the biggest one, not just because I implemented it, but this is something that you have been waiting for since the Xamarin Forms days. And let me just bring up uh maybe my VS Code first, and then the Android and um iOS simulator and emulator right here. Let me get it here behind my head. And what what do you notice? What do you see? Right? Um by the way, all of this code is in a GitHub repository. Again, link in the video description below, so you can inspect all the code that I'm showing you here.

[00:04:05]We've got badges on toolbar items here in the top right, right? Um I think for Android, let me know I I'm not a big Android user, so let me know if this I My feeling is that it's a little bit too much like in the top right there. So, let me know if that's the case, so we can sort that out before.NET 11 goes GA. Um let me know if you have any idea on how that kind of like, you know, should be positioned or what I'm missing here. But for iOS, like look how perfect it is. Amazing. If you click it, you can see it decrement. Um you can also see it here down in the tab bar, in the liquid glass tab bar, right?

[00:04:40]The liquid glass iOS, I love it. I love it. I love it. You can see it here. And for Android here, same thing, right? Um so, you can have that one right there.

[00:04:48]So, it's right here on the tabs as well.

[00:04:51]For shell, you can now set the tabs.

[00:04:53]increment it, right? Increment, increment. You can make a little dot, and it makes a little dot here on the tab bar. Um I did notice while preparing this demo, um see, that's why these videos are useful for me as well. Um I could see a little zero here on the toolbar icon. That's a fix already created a PR, so that should be fixed in the next preview for.NET 11. Um and same thing here with Android, right?

[00:05:14]So, I can clear it. It can go away entirely. I can do a little dot, and you can just see a little dot here. So, now we have all these badges and all these things that you can set a value to. I think you can put emojis in there. I think you can put text in there. It's crazy, crazy, crazy. So, that's coming.

[00:05:29]This is something that has been long time requested. I'm I'm so glad that we can finally bring that to um to.NET MAUI to you. So, let's see how we can do that. Like the API is super simple. Um this is the sample app code project that we got right here. You can find it on my GitHub repository down below. Um Um so, here it created I did this with Copilot, of course. It created a little list with all the new features. Cool, cool, cool. And then, uh I think it's in the XAML right here. So, if I scroll here, we have the toolbar item. And um I don't know why it came out as a toolbar item, but it sounds cool. Uh toolbar item. And here you can say badge text is three. So, the initial version is three.

[00:06:12]Uh badge color is red. Badge text color is white. So, you can also style these things, right? So, you can also style all these things so that it shows up nicely. While talking to this, I'm not sure if that actually is the case for iOS. It might ignore there and just always be red. Not sure about the styling there. I would highly encourage you to test this out today. I know, right? This is beta bits, preview bits. Don't go to production with this, but do me a favor, take a Friday afternoon, pull down the latest preview of all of this, install it on your project, let us know what is going on with it on your actual production app, right? Don't push it to production. On your production app, pull this down, install it, play with these new things that are of interest to you, provide that early feedback so that we know, like in actual app that are actually out there instead of like the sample that we come up with, how it behaves, what are the things we still need to iron out so that you can upgrade to.NET 11 on day one in November instead of having to wait to, you know, for us to get all the bugs out and do stuff like that. Please, please, please do that. Let me know, ping me directly, send the links to me. I will look at them so that your experience is amazing from day one.

[00:07:24]Okay.

[00:07:25]Badge text, badge color, badge text color, right? So, we got all that. Of course, also in the app shell, right?

[00:07:31]So, on the tabs because we saw it there.

[00:07:33]Um badge text, badge color, badge text color, right? Exact same APIs. Um so, you can use them there as well. And I think then here in the app shell, it generated a little bit of code of hey, set the preview badge, right? So, it can set the text for that thing and then does it like that with the tabs here and there.

[00:07:50]This is not necessarily the nicest API.

[00:07:53]I'm not sure how we can do it better. If you have any ideas around that to make it better because what will happen now is that whenever we click this button here set shell badge, right? It does this little thing set shell badge. Where is it? And it it looks at the shell current if it's an app shell and then calls that little thing. It works, I guess. Could be nicer maybe. If you have any ideas around that, please let me know. Okay.

[00:08:16]Badges, what else do we have? So, let's bring up the iOS simulator again. Xcode inline C sharp. Cool, cool, cool. So, let's just click it. Look closely, tap the button to run example local C sharp.

[00:08:27]Ooh. Click. Handled by Xcode at blah blah blah time that I'm recording. Cool.

[00:08:32]What does that mean? Well, if we go look at this actually in the example, there was a little spoiler here already. We can see Xcode C data, et cetera, et cetera. You can see I There is There is code in your example. I already know in the comments there will be haters, there will be lovers. Now it's there. Um use it at your own discretion. Um if you don't want to use it, that's totally fine, right? You're the master of your own code base.

[00:08:59]Um so, don't do anything you don't want to, but this is something that people have been asking for as well. Now we can do it kind of like inline with the C sharp um um expressions in example. With that work, now we brought it to this as well.

[00:09:13]So, now you can just say, "Where is this thing called?"

[00:09:17]Should be somewhere here. Button clicked is et cetera, et cetera, right? On inline code clicked. And you can see it's just a little code block here, Xcode. You can add a Xcode thing in here. I think there are no plans to kind of like make it ASP, PHP that you can also do for loops and print out basically example blocks with this to make the example, um, um, conditional or anything. I don't think that is where we want to go, but who knows. Um, like a year ago we didn't even want to do this. So, uh, we're learning as well as we go based on your feedback. So, this is happening now.

[00:09:51]This is there. Go out and use it. Let's switch over to the, uh, Android one.

[00:09:56]Like obviously here it works too. Okay.

[00:09:58]Um, Android material three control, so you can see it right here. This is actually not material three, I think.

[00:10:04]No, there's the old one. Um, so, you know, it extends to these. I think it added the controls here that should be material three, but it didn't actually put the material three stuff in here.

[00:10:15]Now, compile bindings in data templates.

[00:10:18]Each card below is rendered by a template data template with X data type.

[00:10:22]So, bindings are checked and generated at build time. This is something that was not possible before. So, if we look at the data templates in here, do do do do do do do do, they should be in here. Now, we can say, "Hey, X data type is" and we can specify the type so that also the bindings in this data template are now checked uh, build. So, they are, um, at compile time, um, it will help you with IntelliSense. It will help you with performance. So, that is new and possible now as well..NET Watch, already talked about that. Course UI by default. Monochrome file icons. So, if we look at um, our CS project right here, then we can go down to our Maui icon and we already had include, we already had foreground file. I think that's also Oh, no, that actually makes up like the icon, right? So, we have the foreground file and the monochrome file. So, this is specific to Android, right? Um, this only works on Android. Um, I think for iOS you don't need to do anything special, it will figure it out. Um, maybe we need to do again some work there too to make that more specific and we can hook into this. Let me know down in the comments or on the repository in an issue. Uh, but now you can specify this one and you can see app icon mono.

[00:11:32]In this case, it's not like super um, impressive. So, let me open the resources right here app icon app icon mono. It's a little bit hard to see. Oh, it's actually showing up on the share screen a little bit better. So, this is like the the regular one is white. Here's the mono one, which is black. And then whenever you go to Android, and we go back here and we go out of this, you can see the little icons right here. Long press on the background, wallpaper and style, you can do themed icons on Android. And whenever people do that, everything kind of like looks monochrome and and does things. Before, it wasn't really great.

[00:12:06]Now, you can have this monochrome icon.

[00:12:09]So, that, you know, it will look great depending on your design and your needs and whatever you want to do there. So, you can now configure that as well. And I think that was in a nutshell what.NET Maui 11 preview 4 brings to you. I cannot wait for preview 5. What other cool things are coming? What are you still waiting for? What are the things that we still need to look into?

[00:12:29]That we still need to implement. What are the features that you're waiting for? What are the bugs we still need to fix? There's only There's only a couple left. Let me know down in the comments.

[00:12:37]Point me to it. Ping me on the Maui repository, and I will make sure to have a look at all of that. Give me your thoughts about any of this, and I'll be looking forward to seeing you in one of my other videos. Actually, check out the preview 3 one if you have not done that already. That is popping up right here.

[00:12:53]See you for the next one.