Visual Designer, Hot Reload and Beyond

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

How to run a WinUI 3 (Project Reunion) app on Windows 10X (Xbox and Hololens)

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

Adding Some Behaviors to Your WinUI Uno Application

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

Restyling Controls in an Uno (Windows UI) Application

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

Getting Started with the Uno Platform (Project Reunion/WinUI)

Two years ago I posted on Getting Started with Platform Uno which focused on starting with a UWP application and extending it cross platform using the Uno Platform. For those tracking developments in the Windows development space, you’ll be aware that the 0.5 version of Project Reunion has just been released. It seem fitting to … Read more

Converting Xamarin.Forms to WindowsUI and Uno: SafeArea to VisibleBoundsPadding

Converting a Xamarin.Forms application across to use WinUI + Uno is mostly straight forward as a lot of the XAML is either the same, or has an equivalent. When you’re dealing with platform specifics, one thing you might come across is the SetUseSafeArea call. For example: The Uno platform exposes the concept of safe area … Read more

Simple WinUI + Uno Calculator

A week or so ago David from the XF/Maui team kicked of a thread on twitter challenging devs to add a simple addition to a simple calculator. I particularly liked the transition animation that Robin added, so figured I’d translate this to a WinUI+Uno platform application. I’m going to try to keep as close to … Read more

Async Support for Executing Storyboards in UWP and WinUI

Sometimes I forget just how old and dated XAML is, and how little advances Microsoft has made to make it easy to work with. With the move to WinUI, hopefully we’ll start to see some much needed improvements – we’ve seen some already with the ability to define row and column definitions as a single … Read more

WinUI 3.0 Misconceptions

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

What’s the correlation between .NET 5, WinUI and MAUI (Xamarin.Forms)

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

Thinking Out Loud: Mvvm Navigation for XAML Frameworks such as Xamarin.Forms, UWP/WinUI, WPF and Uno

One of the things that’s often given me pause for thought is the approach we take to navigation within applications. For the purpose of this post I’m going limit the scope to just XAML based applications (XF/Maui, UWP/WinUI/Uno, WPF). In all of these application platforms there is a built in capability to navigate between pages. … Read more