Microsoft has released .NET 11 Preview 7 with a considerable set of .NET MAUI updates, together with cross-platform passkey authentication, a brand new incremental XAML Scorching Reload implementation, Shell route templates, and extra AOT-safe bindings. The discharge additionally continues MAUI’s migration from legacy renderers to handlers and improves growth workflows on Android and Apple platforms.
One of the seen additions is a brand new Passkeys API in MAUI Essentials. It drives the native passkey expertise on Android 14 or later, iOS and Mac Catalyst 16 or later, and supported Home windows 10 variations. Purposes can use Passkeys.CreateAsync to register credentials and Passkeys.AssertAsync for authentication, whereas Passkeys.IsSupported checks whether or not the underlying platform helps the API.
The API handles the platform-side WebAuthn ceremony however intentionally leaves server duties to the appliance. Relying-party servers nonetheless must generate challenges, provide the usual WebAuthn choices, and validate returned assertions or attestations. Purposes additionally want the suitable belief configuration, together with Associated Domains and an Apple App Web site Affiliation file on Apple platforms or Digital Asset Links on Android.
Preview 7 additionally introduces XAML Incremental Hot Reload as a preview function and allows it by default for Debug builds. As a substitute of rebuilding XAML wholesale, the implementation combines a supply generator with MetadataUpdateHandler to change already-created pages. It will possibly deal with property adjustments, including or eradicating youngsters, structural reordering, connected properties, markup extensions, bindings, and ResourceDictionary adjustments, and the identical mechanism works with dotnet watch. Builders can disable it and return to the prevailing Scorching Reload path by way of EnableMauiIncrementalHotReload.
Shell navigation gains route templates modeled on ideas acquainted from ASP.NET Core and Blazor routing. Routes can now comprise required, non-compulsory, default, constrained, catch-all, and combined segments, comparable to product/{sku}. Parameter values circulation by way of the prevailing QueryProperty and IQueryAttributable mechanisms. Nonetheless, template routes presently help solely absolute navigation, not relative navigation.
The XAML supply generator has also expanded its AOT work. {RelativeSource AncestorType=...} bindings can now compile to trim-safe TypedBinding cases when MAUI can resolve the ancestor kind at compile time, avoiding reflection-based string paths that may trigger members to vanish throughout trimming. Some binding kinds, together with Self and TemplatedParent, nonetheless use the runtime path.
As well as, Preview 7 exposes new extension points intended for third-party platform backends. OnPlatform now acknowledges GTK, macOS, and WPF, whereas alert, gesture, Resizetizer, SingleProject, and BlazorWebView infrastructure exposes contracts that exterior backends can implement by way of NuGet packages as an alternative of sustaining patches in opposition to MAUI itself.
The renderer-to-handler migration continues on Apple platforms. NavigationPage and TabbedPage now use handlers by default on iOS and Mac Catalyst, changing their older renderer implementations. The compatibility renderers stay obtainable as handbook fallbacks, so functions with customized renderers or substantial page-level customizations ought to check the change earlier than adopting Preview 7 broadly.
Platform-specific updates embody Window.StatusBarTheme, an possibility to avoid wasting captured media on to the system gallery, and single-instance activation help on Home windows. Android growth additionally will get the brand new FastDeploy2 technique by default, whereas dotnet watch can now Scorching Reload functions operating on bodily iOS and tvOS units over USB or Wi-Fi.
.NET 11 Preview 7 was launched on August 11, 2026. Builders can set up it by way of the .NET 11 Preview SDK and discover the whole MAUI function record, platform notes, migration particulars, and linked implementation points in Microsoft’s announcement and the MAUI Preview 7 release notes.
