Enchanting Cross-Platform UIs: Unveiling the XAML Magic in .NET MAUI

“What is XAML, and why is the UI not in C#?” shows up in interviews more often than in architecture docs. Himanshu Tyagi answers it for .NET MAUI, starting from the markup and walking back through where it came from.

What you’ll learn

• What the markup is for — an XML description of layout and behaviour, kept apart from the code that runs the app, shared across Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows
• The path it took — WPF, then Xamarin.Forms, then .NET MAUI, with a small snippet at each stop so the same idea is visible in each dialect
• Why he prefers it to building the tree in C# — shorter structure, a view that binds instead of reaching into the page, and OnPlatform when one value has to differ by OS
• Resources — DynamicResource for a colour that can change at runtime, and a ResourceDictionary so the same keys are shared
• MVVM from the markup — Mode=OneTime when a value will not change, Mode=TwoWay on an Entry, and Command on a button so the view does not own the click handler

Read the article if you want the interview answer and the bindings side by side, rather than a control catalogue.