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Welcome to Shiny.NET

Shiny.NET

A collection of libraries designed to make .NET development faster, cleaner, and more productive — whether you’re building mobile apps, APIs, or anything in between.

40M+

NuGet Downloads

30+

Libraries

AOT

Ready

100%

Open Source

Build AI Into Your Apps

Turn your contracts, services, routes, and data into AI-callable tools — or drop in a complete voice assistant. Source-generated, AOT-safe function calling that works across mobile, desktop, web, and server.

AI ConversationsA complete conversational service — chat, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and wake word behind one interface. Swap OpenAI, Azure, Ollama, or Copilot freely.Explore Shell NavigationGenerated AITool instances let an AI discover your routes, infer parameters from natural language, and navigate to the right page.Explore MediatorExpose request and command contracts as AI-callable tools — AIFunction wrappers and JSON schemas generated automatically from your attributes.Explore Dependency InjectionTag a service interface and source-generate fully typed, reflection-free AIFunction tools, all registered with a single call.Explore Document DBVector / ANN search across pgvector, SQL Server 2025, Cosmos DiskANN, Mongo Atlas, DuckDB vss, and sqlite-vec — plus LLM-callable tool functions, structured filters, and auto-embed on insert via Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Explore

The Complete Suite

Libraries

Everything you need to build modern .NET applications

App Essentials

The core building blocks every mobile app needs — navigation, background processing, notifications, and AI — unified across iOS, Android, Blazor, and beyond.

AI Conversations — A centralized AI conversation service combining Microsoft.Extensions.AI chat completions with speech recognition, text-to-speech, wake word detection, and audio feedback. Text chat, voice chat, and hands-free mode behind a single IAiConversationService interface.

Shell Navigation — Opinionated Shell navigation with source-generated routes, strongly-typed parameters, and proper ViewModel lifecycle management. No more magic strings or manual wiring.

Background Jobs — Periodic and one-shot background tasks that survive app restarts, with platform-aware scheduling and battery optimization.

HTTP Transfers — Resumable background file uploads and downloads with progress monitoring, Azure Blob Storage support, and foreground service integration.

Local Notifications — Rich local notifications with channels, scheduling triggers, and platform-specific customization.

Push Notifications — Native, Firebase, and Azure Notification Hub push providers with a unified delegate model.

Data Sync — Bidirectional JSON record sync. A persistent outbox queues Create / Update / Delete operations, an inbox pulls cursor-based deltas, and the engine drains both with platform-tier transports: background NSURLSession on iOS / Mac Catalyst, foreground service + HttpClient on Android, and connectivity-driven HttpClient on Windows / Linux / macOS / Blazor WASM. Includes coalesced batching, tombstones, soft-delete predicates, conflict resolution, exponential-backoff retries, and AOT-safe serialization through Shiny.Json.

Get started fast with our templates:

Already have a project? Try the App Builder to generate everything you need.

Device & Sensors

Access device hardware and platform data through clean, cross-platform APIs — Bluetooth, location, music, health, and contacts.

Bluetooth LE — Full BLE client with scanning, connection management, GATT services, background operations, and best-practice patterns.

BLE Hosting — Advertise your device as a BLE peripheral with custom GATT services.

GPS & Geofencing — Foreground and background location tracking with geofence monitoring.

OBD — On-board diagnostics over Bluetooth LE with extensible command support and custom transports.

Music Library — Query tracks, browse by genre/decade/playlist, and play music from the device library.

Health Data — Unified access to Apple HealthKit and Android Health Connect — 12 metrics including steps, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep, and more.

Contact Store — Cross-platform device contact access with full CRUD, LINQ queries with native translation, and MAUI permission classes.

Speech — Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, audio capture, and audio playback with pluggable cloud providers (Azure AI Speech, ElevenLabs).

Mediator

A mediator pattern implementation built for all .NET apps — mobile, desktop, and server. Source-generated, AOT-ready, and packed with middleware that lets you add offline support, caching, validation, resiliency, and more with a single attribute.

Decouple your code, shrink your constructors, and eliminate boilerplate. Works seamlessly with MAUI, Blazor, Uno Platform, ASP.NET Core, Prism, and Dapper.

Get Started · Middleware · Extensions

UI Controls

Rich, ready-to-use components for .NET MAUI and Blazor — one package, zero WebViews. See all controls →

Flagship TableView · Scheduler · ChatView · ImageEditor

Layout & Overlays FloatingPanel · Overlay · Fab & FabMenu · TreeView · CarouselGallery · ParallaxCollectionView · StaggeredGrid · VirtualizedGrid

Input TextEntry · AutoCompleteEntry · AddressEntry · CountryPicker · ColorPicker · FontPicker · Slider · SecurityPin · SignaturePad

Display & Media ImageViewer · Markdown · Mermaid Diagrams · Barcodes & QR

Status & Feedback Toast · ProgressBar · SkeletonView · PillView · BadgeView · Feedback Service

Desktop Tray Icon · Docking · On-Screen Keyboard

Data & Storage

Lightweight, AOT-compatible data libraries that run everywhere .NET does — no ORM overhead.

Document DB — Store and query .NET objects as JSON documents with full CRUD, LINQ-style querying, projections, aggregates, composite JSON indexes, transactions, spatial/geo queries, vector / ANN search with auto-embed on insert, optimistic concurrency, multi-tenancy, global query filters, in-process change monitoring, native database change feeds, and AI tool integration. Full AOT/trimming support. One API across SQLite, SQLCipher, LiteDB, CosmosDB, MongoDB, DuckDB, IndexedDB (Blazor WASM), SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Spatial — A dependency-free spatial database using SQLite R*Tree indexing and custom geometry algorithms. Ship pre-built datasets or build your own geospatial queries.

Extensions

A collection of source generators and utilities that cut boilerplate and boost performance across any .NET project.

Dependency Injection — Attribute-driven DI registration with source generation. Tag your classes, generate your registrations, done.
Stores — A cross-platform key/value store abstraction for Preferences, Secure Storage, Local/Session Storage, and more.
Reflector — Source-generated property access that eliminates reflection for AOT-safe, high-performance code.
Localization Generator — Strongly-typed classes generated from your .resx files. No more typo-prone string lookups.
MAUI Hosting — Modular MAUI app configuration with IMauiModule, static service access, and platform lifecycle dispatch.
Web Hosting — ASP.NET infrastructure modules for common server-side patterns.

Aspire

First-class .NET Aspire integrations for building distributed applications with best-practice defaults.

Orleans — Simplified Orleans hosting for Aspire with streamlined AppHost configuration, Silo setup, and client wiring. Get a fully orchestrated Orleans cluster running in your Aspire app with minimal code.

Gluetun VPN — Model a Gluetun VPN container as a first-class Aspire resource. Route other containers through the VPN tunnel with a single method call, with full Docker Compose publish support.

Foundation

Understand the core concepts and setup that power every Shiny library — architecture, hosting, and tooling to get you started fast.

App Builder — Interactive wizard that generates boilerplate code for your project with the Shiny libraries and configuration you need.

Architecture — Core concepts including services, delegates, and observables that underpin the entire Shiny ecosystem.

Hosting Models — Choose and configure the right hosting model for your app — MAUI, Native, or Manual.

AI Skills — AI coding assistant skills for every Shiny library, compatible with Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.

Templates

Skip the setup and start building. Shiny.Templates scaffolds a fully configured .NET MAUI app with all the Shiny libraries, 40+ curated 3rd party packages, and every platform-specific file already wired up — permissions, plists, entitlements, DI, logging, and more.

Choose your UI markup (XAML, Blazor, or C# Markup), authentication provider, push notification backend, and you’re ready to go.

dotnet new install Shiny.Templates

Get Started · Shiny Libraries · 3rd Party Libraries

AI Coding Assistant Skills

Get contextual code generation and best practices directly in your IDE

Every Shiny library has an AI skill that understands its APIs, patterns, and conventions. These skills work with Claude Code and GitHub Copilot to help you scaffold projects, generate code, and follow best practices.

Browse all AI skills and installation instructions →

Gone .NET

Catch Allan Ritchie (author of Shiny) & Jon Dick (Redth) every week on the Gone .NET YouTube channel for .NET deep dives, library walkthroughs, and community discussions.

Watch on YouTube

Allan Ritchie

8x Microsoft MVPOpen Source Maintainer

Shiny.NET is built and maintained by Allan Ritchie, a software engineer with 25+ years of experience specializing in .NET architecture across cloud, mobile, desktop, and web. He’s been building cross-platform .NET libraries since the early Xamarin days, and his open-source packages have been downloaded over 40 million times on NuGet.

Need help integrating Shiny into your application or want consulting support?

Get in Touch Blog MVP Profile GitHub

Trusted In Production

Companies building real products with Shiny.NET

SpeedyDock is an essential application for drystack marinas, boat clubs, and their clientele, streamlining the process of scheduling and monitoring boat launch requests, reservations, and additional services. It offers a user-friendly alternative to the frequent calls customers used to make, enabling electronic scheduling around the clock. Since its initial release in 2016, SpeedyDock has been accessible across iOS, Android, and web platforms, seamlessly integrating Xamarin and Shiny to manage native functionalities.

A core component of SpeedyDock’s efficiency is Shiny. It powers the app’s capability to work with permissions requests, local notifications, geofencing, and Firebase push, ensuring customers are consistently informed about their request statuses. For marina operators, these timely notifications are instrumental in enhancing service quality when customers set foot on the premises. Shiny has expertly bridged the gap between iOS and Android, offering a structured way to organize and share code, which, in the absence of such a tool, would be intricate due to variances across platforms and different OS versions. It has streamlined our development process for new features and minimized the edge case bugs typically associated with varying Android versions.

Shiny isn’t just a tool for SpeedyDock; it’s a cornerstone of our mobile app development. Its integration has empowered us to deliver a top-tier app with a native experience. Looking ahead, we’re eager to continue our journey with Shiny, leveraging its capabilities for upcoming projects and refining the SpeedyDock experience. It has undeniably been a key factor in our app’s success story.

— Travis Wolfe, CEO SpeedyDock

PoolMath is the go-to pool care app for hundreds of thousands of pool owners, and Shiny has been a critical part of our stack from the beginning. Running on .NET MAUI across iOS & Android, Shiny handles the native plumbing that would take months to build and maintain on our own. It just works, and it works well.

Beyond PoolMath, I see Shiny’s impact across the entire .NET MAUI ecosystem every day in my role at Microsoft. Shiny fills real gaps in the platform — areas where developers would otherwise be writing fragile, platform-specific code. It’s become one of those libraries that the community leans on because it solves hard problems cleanly, and it’s been instrumental in making .NET MAUI a viable choice for production mobile apps that need serious native integration.

If you’re building a .NET MAUI app and you’re not using Shiny, you’re making your life harder than it needs to be.

— Jonathan Dick, CEO PoolMath & Principal Manager @ Microsoft .NET MAUI

At Moultrie, we build mobile apps that connect hunters and landowners to our cellular trail cameras, feeders, and land management tools. Our apps run on .NET MAUI and lean heavily on several Shiny libraries to deliver the kind of native experience our customers expect — reliable background operations, seamless device communication, and responsive notifications even when cellular connectivity is spotty.

Shiny has been instrumental to our product development. What would have been months of platform-specific work across iOS and Android gets reduced to clean, shared code that we can build on with confidence. The breadth of the library suite means we’re not stitching together a dozen different packages with different conventions — Shiny gives us a cohesive foundation that covers our needs and lets our team focus on the features that matter to our users.

For any team building production .NET MAUI apps that need to go beyond the basics, Shiny is the library suite you want in your toolbox.

— Tommy Baggett, Principal Software Architect, Moultrie

Using Shiny in Production?

We’d love to hear about it! If your company is using any of the Shiny libraries, consider sharing your story and having your company logo featured on this page. It helps the community grow and shows others what’s possible with Shiny.NET.

Get in Touch