WinUI 3.0 Misconceptions

Recently I came across a twitter thread talking about WinUI 3.0 (WinUI3) and how it failed to live up to expectations. Hopefully @JaykeBirdCoding won’t mind me going through his tweets and providing my thoughts – if you get value out of this analysis, please make sure you go follow @JaykeBirdCoding! For anyone else out there … Read more

Unpackaged Windows Apps with Identity using a Sparse Package

In my previous post I made a passing reference to the use of sparse packages to allow unpackaged Windows applications to acquire an identity. In this post we’re going to walk through creating a sparse package and attaching it to an unpackaged Windows application. Before we get into it I want to link to a … Read more

Trust, Identity and AppContainer for Windows Apps

Following my previous post where I explored different packaging options for Win32 and UWP apps, I realised that there are some options I didn’t mention. In this post I’m going to provide a very quick summary of the options I’ve come across and how they define the running context of an app. Here goes…. Vanilla … Read more

Errors with Windows Application Packaging Project

Here’s a quick fix for an error I came across when I’ve been experimenting with various packaging options for WPF (Win32) applications. To set the scene I have a new application, PackagingWPF, that I created based on the WPF Application project template. At this stage I’m not even going to both modifying the application. Next … Read more

Combining .NET 5, WinUI, UWP – FullTrust, PartialTrust, WindowsAppContainer

As Microsoft progresses towards the first release of WinUI3 and in parallel invests into Project Reunion, the gap between Win32 based applications (eg WinForms, WPF) and UWP applications is being eroded. In this post we’re going to look at the role of trust, identity, capabilities and the Windows App Container, and how they relate to … Read more

Missing Files in Multi-Targeted Project

In the .NET ecosystem there have been a number of different approaches to building libraries that work cross platform (i.e. support building apps for different platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows etc). One of the more recent is to build a multi-targeted project that can light up either different features or just different implementations for … Read more

Windows Packages (APPX, MSIX etc) are a Band-Aid Solution

The Windows platform supports a number of different development frameworks (WinForms, WPF, UWP etc) and a number of different deployment models (xcopy, appx, msix etc). In this post we’re going to take a look at why the current trend for packaging Windows applications is a stop-gap, a temporary solution to the problem of application management … Read more