Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
I’ve talked a lot in the past about how XAML applications lend themselves to being styled using data and control templates. The Uno Platform, which defaults to the Fluent theme, also supports Material, which adjusts the control templates for the in-box controls according to the Material theme from Google. In this post we’re going to … Read more
With the latest generation of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft is integrating AI deep into the core of Windows with features like Recall and Click to Do. In this post we’ll look at Click to Do and how you can use it to launch an Uno Platform application. Before we jump into our Uno Platform application, let’s … Read more
I decided to ask ChatGPT what suggestions it had for building cross platform applications. Here’s it’s response, along with some commentary, specifically around the offering by the Uno Platform. What’s the best guidance for building cross platform applications? From ChatGPT: The best guidance for building cross-platform applications can be broken into strategic decisions, tooling choices, … Read more
As I discussed in my previous post the Uno Platform team have release a subscription based offering, Uno Platform Studio, which includes a runtime visual designer, Hot Design. In this post we’re going to use a new application to launch Hot Design and take a look around. The first thing to be aware of after … Read more
As the .NET ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, so does the need for robust tooling that helps developers build cross-platform applications faster and more efficiently. If you’ve been exploring the Uno Platform ecosystem, you may have come across two offerings: the free, open-source Uno Platform and the paid Uno Platform Studio. While they’re closely … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
In my previous post I looked how the Windows UI 3 Figma file components and variants map to styles and visual states in Windows UI but glosses over some of the details of how resources and in particular, Styles, are defined in Windows UI. To cover this in more detail, in this post we’re going to drill … Read more
In a previous post I covered using Figma to design and develop applications for Windows and the Uno Platform. This was a high level post that didn’t get into either Figma files (Fluent and Material) in much detail. One thing that is common to both files is the use of components, and component variants, to … Read more
OAuth2 is quite a common authentication standard for web services to use. Whilst a lot of services have now updated to use OpenID Connect, there are still some, like the Figma api, that still use OAuth2. In this post we’re going to walk through using the Uno.Extensions web authentication package to simplify not only the … Read more
Designing applications for Windows and the Uno Platform can be difficult if you attempt to start from a clean slate and assume that you have to design everything from the ground up. This would require you to design even simple elements like a TextBox and a Button. After designing each element, a developer would then … Read more
This post is going to walk through using the Microsoft tool, Kiota, to generate client code from a Swagger / OpenAPI definition that can be used within a Windows (WinUI/Windows App Sdk) / Uno Platform application. Ok, so let’s backup a little – firstly, Swagger / OpenAPI (see description) is used to describe service endpoints. … Read more