UWP
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
XAML Basics for WPF, UWP, Uno and WinUI
This is an index post for a series of blog posts covering some XAML basics. The original content came from a series of posts that Beatriz Stollnitz made on WPF/Silverlight that had been moved to a github repository. Unfortunately most of the samples don’t work out of the box with the latest version of Visual Studio … Read more
XAML Back to Basics #6: SelectedValue v SelectedItem
What is the difference between SelectedValue and SelectedItem?
XAML Back to Basics #4: ComboBox Binding
How to bind the items of a ComboBox (and get its ComboBoxItems
Xbox UWP – Unable to Activate Windows Store App – Error 0x8004090a
Building and deploying UWP apps on Xbox is frustrating – every time I come back to it I get caught out by things that should just work. The one that always seems to get me is that you have to be signed in on the Xbox. This used to not be a problem because Visual … Read more
Don’t Judge XAML Based On Lines of Code
For those following the on-going discussion around the future of XAML and specifically the use of XAML in DotNetMaui/Xamarin.Forms, this post is a follow on from two great posts discussing the options that are, or will be, available for Xamarin.Forms developers as we move forward with DotNetMaui: Mobile Blazor Bindings – Getting Started + Why … Read more
DotNetMaui (Xamarin.Forms) is Not a XAML Platform
Yeh I know I’m going to get a ton of abuse about how this title is just click bait but before you start with the comments, hear me out. Firstly, the title is actually just missing a word DotNetMaui is Not JUST a XAML Platform In this post we’ll go through why DotNetMaui/Xamarin.Forms is/is not … Read more
Windows (UWP) Point Animations
A week or so ago I noticed a really slick piece of animation done as part of a Flutter app. Unfortunately I can no longer find the tweet as the account has been removed. However, it perked my interest enough to go playing with animations in XAML to see what I can do. Note that … Read more
Windows (UWP) Designer in Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio
If you’ve been looking at the release notes for the Visual Studio previews, you’ll have noted that there’s some work being done on the XAML designer that now supports both WPF and UWP. I figured I would take this opportunity to go through and document some of the features that I use and some of … Read more
Xamarin DevOps Snippets (aka Pipeline Templates)
Louis Matos has put together Xamarin Month with the topic of Code Snippets – Check out Louis’ blog for the full month of snippet. In this post I’m going to cover some code snippets that use Pipeline Templates in order to setup a Azure DevOps pipeline for your Xamarin application. Azure Pipeline Templates are a way … Read more
Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects
In my previous post on using multi-targeted cross platform projects I showed how you can add additional target frameworks to allow the addition of platform specific code to a library. One of the downsides of this approach (versus perhaps using a shared project) is that the library gets built once for every target framework that’s … Read more
Cross-Platform Libraries with Multi-Targeting for Xamarin, Uno and Windows Development
The story of cross platform development for Microsoft developers has been one marked by iteration after iteration of .NET framework fragmentation. With .NET 5 the promise is that we’ll return to having a single framework that will be used everywhere…. Sorry, what?? when did we ever have a single framework? For as long as I … Read more
Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 4 – Custom Shadows
In part 2 of this series of posts on Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications (parts 1, 1b, 2 and 3) we saw that the composition APIs could be used to generate a DropShadow. However, what wasn’t immediately clear is that this mechanism only works for a limited set of controls, namely Shape (including Ellipse, … Read more
Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 3 – DropShadowPanel
In Part 2 of this series I talked about how to create your own shadow using the DropShadow class. I mentioned that whilst it was easy enough to do, the DropShadow had to be created in code, rather than being applied in XAML. Well the good news is that the team building the Windows Community … Read more