Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
Whilst I was working on migrating the WeatherTwentyOne app from Maui to Uno I noticed that the Maui application includes a number images as SVG files. However, in the XAML there are only ever references to PNG files. On closer inspection of the bin folder for the WinUI project I noticed that for each SVG … Read more
As the dotnet Maui team continue to churn out each preview, it’s great to see some of the showcase apps coming together. One of these is the WeatherTwentyOne app that David Ortinau has been working on. Whilst I’ve been doing a lot of work with the Uno platform recently, I haven’t been spending as time … Read more
As a true demonstration of the capabilities of the Uno Platform the Nuget Package Explorer (source on GitHub / Microsoft Store) is now available at https://nuget.info. For more information read the announcement. One thing that’s not immediately obvious is that https://nuget.info is in fact a PWA. In Edge (and Chrome) you should see an icon … Read more
Over the last week I’ve been exploring different ways to measure the time it takes for an app to launch and be ready for the user to interact with. I’ll go into more detail on this topic in subsequent posts but I wanted first to take a bit of a side track into thinking about … Read more
I’ve covered this a couple of times already but it’s already possible to run a Windows UI (aka WinUI / Project Reunion) app as “partial trust”. This is roughly equivalent to the security context of a UWP application. However, there are some difference, which I’m assuming Microsoft will have to bridge if they’re going to … Read more
In the last couple of years we’ve seen a massive spike in interest around “Hot Reload” thanks to the popularity of frameworks such as React/React Native and more recently, Flutter. The goal of Hot Reload is to allow developers to iteratively change their application code, whilst debugging their application – this cuts down considerably the … Read more
If you look at what Microsoft is working on with Project Reunion, it’s clear to see that they’ve set a vision to reunite the various groups of Windows developers. The aim is not to have every developer using exactly the same technology stack but rather to give every developer access to the richness of the … Read more
With the recent release of Windows UI and support for cross platform offered by the Uno Platform, it’s going to take a little while for the various UWP libraries that we’re familiar with to be ported across. They firstly need to be ported to Windows UI and then they need a Uno build. The Uno … Read more
In my previous post, Multi-Platform PixelPerfect UI with Windows UI and the Uno Platform, I demonstrated how applications built using Project Reunion (i.e. Windows UI), coupled with the Uno Platform, could deliver an identical user experience across a variety of platforms. In this post I’m going to walk through changing the style of one of … Read more