Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
This is a quick post just to provide a reference point for anyone who’s looking for the default styles, templates, colors etc for Windows UI. Let’s break this down a bit: UWP Let’s start with the current technology, UWP. If you want to inspect the default styles and templates for UWP controls, you just need … Read more
The next 6-12 months are going to be super exciting with both preview and releases planned for WinUI, Project Reunion and Maui (aka Xamarin.Forms). WinUI/Reunion represent a significant decoupling for Windows apps from the underlying OS version. Meanwhile Maui will provide a bit of a reset for Xamarin.Forms which some major improvements to the way … Read more
If you’re a developer that builds apps using .NET for Windows you’ll be familiar with Microsoft’s attempts to deliver a better developer story. Unfortunately this usually involves learning a new, typically under-baked, technology that in theory will make it easy to deliver better apps for Windows. Whether this was the jump from WinForms to WPF … Read more
This post originated from a tweet demonstrating how easily you can use the ImageSharp library in a Blazor server side app to generate images. In this post I’ll show how we can reuse the same code plus WinUI+Uno to generate images for iOS, Android, Windows (Desktop+UWP) and Web (WASM) I figured it’d be easy enough … Read more
Firstly, the news – Microsoft has made preview 1 of .NET 6 available. Make sure you checkout the long blog post that gives background on what’s coming in .NET 6 and what’s shipped in the preview. Setup Next, grab the bits and get ready to build an Android app using .NET 6. Make sure you … Read more
Preview 4 of WinUI3.0 dropped recently and if you want to get started you’ll need the preview of Visual Studio and the WinUI project templates. One of the things I noticed was that some of the tool windows I was used to from UWP weren’t working as I expected. I recall hearing that Microsoft had … Read more
As we get close to preview 4 of WinUI 3.0 (it’s Feb 2021 already so where’s my WinUI preview4!), now’s the time to start looking at how you’re going to upgrade your UWP application to WinUI3.0. In this post we’ll look at a migration approach that will allow you to keep your UWP app running … Read more
After installing both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Preview I ran into the issue that when I pinned both to the taskbar, I didn’t know which was which. If I hovered over the icon, the tooltip indicated that the one on the right is Visual Studio 2019 Preview but I wanted a quicker way to … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
This week I’ve been looking further into where WinUI3 is at and specifically how it relates to both Win32 and UWP applications. Along this journey I ran into a slight issue with WinUI3 for Desktop application that simply wouldn’t run if I published and then installed the package. In this post I’m going to walk … Read more
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
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
Over the last couple of years there have been a couple of key developments in the .NET world. However, despite a lot of rhetoric from Microsoft about building a better developer ecosystem, the reality is that the current landscape for building apps using .NET is a mess and no amount of sugar coating is going … Read more
A while ago Windows introduced a little-known feature that allows applications to automatically restart when Windows is restarted. However, rather than just look at this feature, which Windows app developer get for free, in this post we’re going to look at different options for starting and restarting a Windows application when Windows starts/restarts. Launch on … Read more
As part of writing code to read and write data to Azure Cosmos DB I created a bunch of test cases. However, I didn’t want to have my test cases reading and writing from an actual Cosmos DB instance. For this, the Cosmos DB Emulator is perfect. That is, until you come to want to … Read more
If you start down the path of implementing Event Sourcing, you’ll most likely come across https://cloudevents.io/ which has the tag line “A specification for describing event data in a common way”. This project seems to be well supported (take a look at the contributors list) and has language projections for a number of different languages. … Read more