Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
Quite often I hear the complaint that WinUI, and thus Uno Platform, doesn’t include validation. There was some evidence a while ago that it was being worked on by the WinUI team (ie commented out validation XAML in the WinUI styles), but there doesn’t seem to be any more progress in this area, despite a … Read more
The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern has long been a cornerstone in building maintainable and testable UIs across frameworks like WPF, Xamarin, Uno Platform, and others. It provides a clean separation of concerns and enables powerful data binding. But despite its popularity and maturity, MVVM often introduces unnecessary complexity and friction—particularly when it comes to state management … Read more
In this post we’re going to do two things. Firstly, we’re going to step through how to create an Uno Platform application with VS Code. Then, we’re going to use VS Code to generate an instructions file that will help guide Copilot Chat to generate output that’s more consistent with your application structure. Setting up … Read more
Last week v6.0 of the Uno Platform was released marking the cumulation of a number of years of investment in both the core cross platform framework, as well as the new Uno Platform Studio (including Hot Design), a set of tools that are designed to accelerate your development. In this post we’re going to take … Read more
In the past three posts about working with AI on Windows, we covered connecting to Phi Silica, getting progress response, and building a chat experience. In this post we’re going to improve the styling of the chat by using data templates and including a system message to setup the chat interaction. At the end of the previous … Read more
In the past two posts we covered connecting to Phi Silica and then getting progress response to provide a more real time experience. The next step is to improve the layout of the application to display the prior message history. In this post we’ll cover updating the UI to include a list of prior messages. … Read more
In my previous post I covered the basics of creating an Uno Platform application that consumes Phi Silica in order to build a very basic prompt-response based user interface. When the application was run there was a very evident latency when the button was clicked before the response was presented. In this post we’re going … Read more
Last year Microsoft introduced Phi Silica and recently made an experimental release of the Windows App Sdk that can be used by Windows application to interact with Phi Silica. In this post we’ll connect an Uno Platform application to Phi Silica. We’ll keep things simple and start with the Blank preset in the Uno Platform … Read more
In my previous attempt with TempoLabs I was able to successfully build the ABN lookup scenario that I’d been testing with other app builders. I was prompted to take another look and I was even more impressed this time around. In order to do a comparison with my experience from my last attempt I started … Read more
Ok, so the title is a bit of a mouthful but here’s the scenario – you want to quickly spin up an application but you don’t want to mess around downloading and installing any of the usual development tools required to build an Uno Platform application. In this post we’re going to walk through creating … Read more
I was watching overview of TempoLabs and my initial impression was “wow, that’s a lot of stuff” as they not only have AI generation but it seems they understand at least the basics of a software devlelopment process. When you invoke the AI generation, it firstly parrots back its understanding of what you’ve asked for. … Read more
Following from my previous attempt at building a simple app to retrieve the ABN for a business, I figured I’d give lovable.dev a go. This will be a quick post to cover some of the likes/dislikes from this process. Firstly I have to hand it to Lovable, they’ve done a great job with the user … Read more
I figured I’d take some of these AI app builders for a run to see how capable they are. To date I’ve mainly just been taking advantage of the AI capabilities that are progressively being added to VS Code and Visual Studio though tooling such as Copilot but I’m hoping that these AI app builders, … Read more
The default template for a Windows application comes with almost no guidance for how developers should do even basic things like logging. Luckily, the Uno Platform wizard provides a simple way to create an application that configures the Microsoft.Extensions for each of the supported platforms. This includes the ability to setup Microsoft.Extensions.Logging with the ability … Read more
Following my previous posts that introduced the AI Dev Gallery, added AI code to an Uno Platform application and adjusting the AI code to work with Android, in this post we’re going to look at the adjustments required to get the AI code to work on iOS. The issues with iOS aren’t apparent until you … Read more
In the last two posts I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, and then demonstrated how code exported from the AI Dev Gallery can be added to an Uno Platform application. Unfortunately, whilst the code compiles on all the target platforms of the Uno Platform, the application fails to operate … Read more
In my previous post I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, as a way of creating a Windows application that can use AI. In my post I exported the code for object detection, which uses the Faster RCNN 10 model. In this post, we’re going to take this code and … Read more
Recently, Microsoft announced an open-sourced project that they’ve been working on, AI Dev Gallery. Whilst it’s not available on the Microsoft Store as an app you can download, it’s easy enough to clone the repository and run the app. In this post we’ll use the AI Dev Gallery to build a simple Windows application that … Read more
Earlier this month Microsoft introduced the preview of Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Abstractions and Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries with the aim of making it easier for .NET developers to integrate AI services into their applications. The Uno Platform provides support for using Microsoft.Extensions in applications that target Windows and any other Uno Platform target (iOS, Android, MacCatalyst etc) via the Uno.Extensions … Read more
XAML is often criticised for being verbose, hard to read and unnecessary as an additional language for defining the interface for an application. This feedback has lead to the creation of C# markup which works with both Windows UI / Windows App SDK and Uno Platform applications. However, I find that the declarative nature and … Read more