Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
There are two main options for building applications in .NET and leverage the Windows App SDK, that target multiple platforms (aka cross-platform or multi-platform applications) with is Microsoft’s .NET MAUI and the Uno Platform. Before everyone jumps up and down that I’ve missed Avalonia UI, they don’t fit in this category because they don’t leverage … Read more
One of the most significant aspects of the XAML based applications is the concept of lookless controls. I’ve covered this topic a bit in the past but in summary it means that controls can be restyled without changing the behaviour. The Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform provide out of the box styles for … Read more
With the transition from UWP to WinUI and from Xamarin iOS/Android to .NET for iOS and Android, we’re seeing the convergence of application development in the .NET ecosystem. This convergence shouldn’t be undervalued and is particularly evident when you realised that all of these once disparate platforms, can now take advantage of the common tooling … Read more
A common problem for multi-project applications, frameworks or libraries is how to manage the versions of NuGet package that are referenced. Often packages will be updated in one project but not others, leading to a state of confusion, particularly if one of the packages causes issuse, or there are incompatibilities between versions. In this post … Read more
I’ve touched on implicit and explicit styles a couple of times in previous posts (eg here and here) when talking about XAML styles. In this post I wanted to provide a more detailed explanation on what implicit and explict styles are and how they should be used in XAML to style controls. In discussing style … Read more
One of the questions that came up recently was how to make what appears to be a simple change to a Button – change the background colour of the Button to Red when it’s disabled. You’d think this would be simply a matter of changing a property on the Button but for most flavours of … Read more
I have to start this post by pointing out what a major bonus it is for .NET developers that you can build, deploy and debug an iOS application on Windows – that’s right, if you didn’t already know this, if you’re using Xamarin (now net6 ios/android), Xamarin.Forms (now dotnetmaui) or Uno Platform, you can do … Read more
In my previous post I started a series talking about using the Uno.Extensions that the Uno Platform team have been working on. This post was supposed to be a follow-on post but instead I want to recap one of the topics in the previous post. In case you missed the announcement, version 4.3 of the … Read more
This post will be the first in a series of posts talking about Uno.Extensions, a set of libraries that the Uno team have been working on to simplify common application scenarios and make it quicker and easier to build robust multi-platform applications using the Uno Platform. The source code for this post, and subsequent posts … Read more
The .NET Maui team at Microsoft recently dropped Release Candidate 1, so I thought it worth taking a quick look at how it compares to both it’s predecessor, Xamarin.Forms, and the Uno Platform, which is arguably the market leader for building multi-platform application with .NET. If you missed the announcement by Microsoft, here’s a tweet … Read more
One of the guilty truths of software development is that despite our best efforts we never write enough tests, and seldom do we write enough automated tests. This isn’t entirely our fault because for some reason testing frameworks, particularly those for UI testing, always seem to be an after thought. In this post we’re going … Read more
This topic is a bit of a divergence from regular content regarding building mobile, desktop and web apps using cross platform technologies like Uno and Flutter. However, you shouldn’t underestimate the complexity of building scalable backend services to support mobile applications. Whilst this post will be an introductory post on gettting started with Microsoft Orleans, … Read more
Developing cross platform applications, targeting platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows and Web, is becoming progressively easier. As .NET developers, one of the leading technologies for building cross platform apps is the Uno platform. Whilst Visual Studio, and the corresponding Uno solution templates, make it easy to create a new Uno application, setting up a … Read more
As part of the announcement of Windows 11 earlier this year, Microsoft touted the ability to run Android applications on Windows. Recently this feature was made available via the Beta channel of the Windows Insider program. In this post I’m going to step through setting up the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), in order to … Read more
I think this will be the last in the series of posts covering validation using the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface, which can be used to expose validation error messages directly in your XAML. In this post we’re going to look at adding custom validation using both the CustomValidationAttribute and by creating our own ValidationAttribute. We’ll also look … Read more
In my previous post, Adding Validation to a XAML Control Using INotifyDataErrorInfo, I walked through adding validation to a view model using the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface and the Community Toolkit. This post will pick up where that post left off and look at how you can customise the error message that gets displayed. This will improve … Read more
In my previous post on Building a XAML UserControl I made use of the CommunityToolkit.Mvvm (formerly Microsoft.Toolkit.Mvvm) NuGet package to provide the implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged used to data bind properties of our view model to the XAML controls. In this post we’re going to again use the community toolkit but this time we’re going to … Read more
One of the powerful aspects of any XAML platform is the ability to define your own controls. In this post we’re going to look at building a user control that allows you to reuse chunks of your user experience. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using UWP, WinUI, Xamarin.Forms (.NET Maui) or the Uno Platform, the … Read more
The Windows Community Toolkit provides a limited feature camera preview control for both UWP and WinUI but this doesn’t help if you want to build a cross platform application with the Uno Platform. In this post I wanted to share the very, very, very early version of a CameraPreview control for Uno. Initial support will … Read more
With the recent excitement surrounding the announcement of Windows 11, there’s renewed interest in developing apps for the Windows platform. In this post we’re going to celebrate what it means to be a Windows App Developer, regardless of what framework or technology you chose. It’s not going to be an exhaustive list of options but … Read more