Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
Recently Microsoft has been promoting Copilot+ PCs as the next wave of tablets, laptops and PCs capable of handling your AI requirements. Other than having a Copilot button, what does this actually mean? In this post we’ll take a look at what makes these PCs different, how you can detect that your application is running … 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
Following my previous posts that introduced the AI Dev Gallery, added AI code to an Uno Platform application and adjusting the AI code to work with Android, in this post we’re going to look at the adjustments required to get the AI code to work on iOS. The issues with iOS aren’t apparent until you … Read more
In the last two posts I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, and then demonstrated how code exported from the AI Dev Gallery can be added to an Uno Platform application. Unfortunately, whilst the code compiles on all the target platforms of the Uno Platform, the application fails to operate … Read more
In my previous post I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, as a way of creating a Windows application that can use AI. In my post I exported the code for object detection, which uses the Faster RCNN 10 model. In this post, we’re going to take this code and … Read more
Recently, Microsoft announced an open-sourced project that they’ve been working on, AI Dev Gallery. Whilst it’s not available on the Microsoft Store as an app you can download, it’s easy enough to clone the repository and run the app. In this post we’ll use the AI Dev Gallery to build a simple Windows application that … Read more
Earlier this month Microsoft introduced the preview of Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Abstractions and Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries with the aim of making it easier for .NET developers to integrate AI services into their applications. The Uno Platform provides support for using Microsoft.Extensions in applications that target Windows and any other Uno Platform target (iOS, Android, MacCatalyst etc) via the Uno.Extensions … 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
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
This has been a work in progress over the last couple of releases in order to deliver a better developer experience for the Uno Platform. The 5.1 release introduced the Uno.Sdk which allowed for better integration with Visual Studio – no more pesky “reload project” warnings appearing. With the 5.2 release the Uno Platform goes … Read more
In my previous post I walked through how to connect to ChatGPT in order to integrate AI into a multi-platform (Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform) based application. In this post we’re going to add the ability to switch which AI model (GPT 3, 4 etc) is used when connecting to ChatGPT. We’ll also cover … Read more
In today’s digital world, integrating AI into your applications has become increasingly important. One powerful AI model that you can leverage is OpenAI’s GPT, known for its natural language processing capabilities. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the process of connecting your Windows app to ChatGPT using the Microsoft Azure.AI.OpenAI library, allowing you … Read more
As with all software managing dependencies in often a lot harder than it seems, particularly when there are conflicting priorities. In this post I’m going to talk about some of the challenges developers face relating to dependencies when building Windows and cross/multi platform applications using .NET, the Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform. I’ll … Read more
Last week, the Uno Platform officially launched their Figma Plugin which works in parity with the Uno Platform Material Toolkit to support both designers and developers with the process of designing applications. If you haven’t already, check out the announcement post that provides a high level overview of both the plugin and toolkit. In this post we’ll … Read more
I figured I’d start the year off with a quick thought post on where things are at with building apps for Windows. As Windows rapidly approaches the 4 decade mark, you’d expect there to be a well defined model for building apps. Instead we’re still realing from the years of missteps and indecision by Microsoft. … Read more