11 Beyond the basics: Custom controls

.NET MAUI comes with enough controls to let you build almost any UI. Functionally, there is very little that you can’t do using just the standard controls, and they are highly customizable through styles and various styling properties. But, sometimes, you need to go a little further.

In .NET MAUI you have a few ways to build or customize controls, from bundling controls into a reusable component, to customizing the platform implementations that come in the box, to drawing your own controls and graphics with the Microsoft.Maui.Graphics library.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the first two of these three approaches. We’ll start by building our own control by reusing the built-in controls, and we’ll also see how we can modify the way that .NET MAUI displays the built-in controls by default.

11.1 Using ContentView

11.1.1 Building the custom stepper layout

11.1.2 Improving the custom stepper’s UX

11.2 Bindable properties

11.2.1 Adding the Value property

11.2.2 Adding the IsEnabled property

11.3 Modifying platform controls with handlers

11.3.1 Handler architecture

11.3.2 Overriding handler mappings

11.3.3 Implementing custom handler logic

11.3.4 Updating the custom stepper

11.4 Creating and sharing control libraries