Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
One of the most significant aspects of the XAML based applications is the concept of lookless controls. I’ve covered this topic a bit in the past but in summary it means that controls can be restyled without changing the behaviour. The Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform provide out of the box styles for … Read more
Microsoft just shipped v1.2 of the Windows App SDK, which includes support for creating third-party Widgets for Windows. During the previews, it was understood that there was a limitation that the widget provider (i.e. the functionality of the widget) needs to be developed using C++. However, this changed and the final release included support for … Read more
In writing my previous post on Implicit and Explicit Styles in XAML I was reminded of a bug in the definition of the DefaultButtonStyle which prevents you setting the Foreground colour of a Button. The issue is documented, along with the fix, in this issue but for whatever reason (and I can’t think of one … Read more
I’ve touched on implicit and explicit styles a couple of times in previous posts (eg here and here) when talking about XAML styles. In this post I wanted to provide a more detailed explanation on what implicit and explict styles are and how they should be used in XAML to style controls. In discussing style … Read more
One of the questions that came up recently was how to make what appears to be a simple change to a Button – change the background colour of the Button to Red when it’s disabled. You’d think this would be simply a matter of changing a property on the Button but for most flavours of … Read more
Code sample for this post is on GitHub: AppWindowSample One of the more significant differences between building apps for mobile devices, such as iOS and Android, and desktop pcs (Windows or Mac) is the concept of windows. On a mobile device, your app typically runs full screen, or perhaps split screen on some devices, so … Read more
As we get progressively closer to the v1 release of the Windows App Sdk I thought it worth looking into the different deployment/packaging options you have. In this post we’re going to look at the startup logic for a WinUI 3 Desktop application and discuss how this relates to the different packaging options that are … Read more
Just a quick heads up that there’s an issue that has been discovered with previews 1 and 2 of the Windows App SDK, as documented here. There is an upcoming preview 3 which will address this issue. At the time of writing, the latest stable release is v0.8.5. There is also a v1.0.0-experimental1 build that … Read more
As we get closer to the first release of the Windows App SDK, Microsoft has started shipping preview releases. Whilst it’s not clear what “preview” means versus “experimental”, it does appear that the move to shipping releases via the preview channel indicates that we’re getting very close to the v1 stable release. In this post … Read more
As a UWP developer I relied heavily on the framework to deal with managing application resources such as images and string literals. You might think this is quite simple as images are just files that are packaged with your app and strings can just be put in a constants file. Where this all gets complicated … Read more
One of the most annoying “features” of both UWP and WinUI/ProjectReunion WindowsAppSDK apps is the need to generate a package. With UWP development, the packaging was built into the UWP project. However, with the WindowsAppSDK, a separate packaging project is currently required. In this post we’re going to walk through how you can remove this … Read more
Last night / this morning I sat through one of the most professional and well executed series of non-live presentations from Microsoft covering Windows 11 and all the great features / tools that are coming for developers. In this post I’m going to cover some of the points that I took away from the sessions, … Read more
This is a quick post just to provide a reference point for anyone who’s looking for the default styles, templates, colors etc for Windows UI. Let’s break this down a bit: UWP Let’s start with the current technology, UWP. If you want to inspect the default styles and templates for UWP controls, you just need … Read more