Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
This post looks at deploying resources defined using Azure Bicep to multiple environments using Azure DevOps Pipeliens
As I start to work with Azure Bicep I figured I’d share some of my experiences here. First up, is just a quick recap of how to generate bicep code from an ARM template. Actually, the problem I initially started with was how to start writing bicep code since I wasn’t really familiar with either … Read more
This post will explores mvvm navigation further, employing the latest c# 9 code generator to reduce the boilerplate code that developers have to write.
Build and debug a source code generator with C# 9 and Visual Studio.
This post covers how you can use a .bicep file in your Azure DevOps pipeline to deploy resources to Azure via an ARM template
A feature that was added to .NET Core apps was the ability to publish as a single file. As we approach the release of .NET 5 I thought it worthwhile taking a look at the options for publishing Windows Forms and WPF applications with dotnet publish. For this post we’re going to work with a … Read more
Firstly, if you haven’t been following the development of .NET 5 then you should definitely download the latest Visual Studio preview and .NET 5 preview SDK today. Next, you should follow the blogs from the dotnet team and specifically the post by Immo that discusses the future of .NET Standard. The post doesn’t just cover … Read more
