Designing and Building Windows Applications using Figma and the Uno Platform

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

Saving Data using Settings for Windows and Uno Platform Applications

Following on from the posts on Dependency Injection, Logging and Configuration, in this post we’re going to look at how data can be persisted between sessions using Settings within a Windows or Uno Platform application. This series makes use of Uno.Extensions in order to initialize the services that are required by the application. At the end of the … Read more

Configuration for Windows and Uno Platform Applications

Following on from Dependency Injection and Logging, in this post we’re going to configure the IHostBuilder to load and access configuration information within a Windows or Uno Platform application. We’ll pick up where we left off with the IHostBuilder setup to switch environments and configure logging. var builder = this.CreateBuilder(args) .Configure(host => host #if DEBUG … Read more

Logging for Windows and Uno Platform Applications

In my previous post I covered Dependency Injection for Windows and Uno Platform Applications which covered creating a new application and adding dependency injection using the Uno.Extensions which leverages the Microsoft Extensions IHostBuilder to create an IHost instance. In this post we’re going to adjust the IHostBuilder to setup Logging support. We’re going to start … Read more

Adding .NET MAUI Controls to an Existing Uno-Platform Application

DevExpress

In case you haven’t seen the release notes or the blog post the 4.10 release for the Uno Platform was pretty huge with a couple of big features shipping in this release. One of these features was .NET MAUI Embedding with allows any .NET MAUI Control to be embedded within an Uno Platform application. If … Read more

Windows Community Toolkit for UWP, WinUI and Uno

The Windows Community Toolkit is in pre-release of v8 – full details of their announcement here. With the new consolidated structure, there are packages for both UWP and WinUI but more importantly both sets of packages also target the Uno Platform. In this post we’re going to walk through adding one of the components from … Read more

Integrating ImageSharp with Windows and Uno Platform Applications

Earlier this week Six Labors announced the release of ImageSharp.Drawing v1.0 and it made me wonder whether this could be used as an alternative to Skia for controls that want to do custom rendering in a Windows, or multi-platform Uno Platform, application. For Skia there are already Uno (which includes Windows/WinUI) views (see source here) … Read more

Hot Reload in Windows Applications

In a previous post on the topic of hot reload I discussed using the CreateNewOnMetadataUpdate attribute to force updating of entire classes, rather than patching existing types. This makes hot reload more resilient but does require additional logic in order to apply the newly created types. In this post we’re going to walk through the … Read more

VisualTransition and State Animations in WinUI and the Windows App SDK

One of the things that sets WinUI apart from other UI frameworks is that provides a declarative way to define visual states for a control or a page. It also allows for the transitions between states to be defined. In this post we’re going to cover how to define both transitions and state animations and … Read more

Deep dive – Uno Platform Template Wizard – Extensions, Application and Theme

This is the last post in the sequence talking about the new wizard that’s available for creating multi-platform applications with .NET and the Windows App SDK (WinUI), leveraging the Uno Platform (previously here, here, here and here). In this post we’ll look at the last three sections: Extensions, Application and Theme. Extensions The Extensions section is broken down into … Read more

Deep dive – Uno Platform Template Wizard – Projects, Testing and Features

This is the next post in the sequence talking about the new wizard that’s available for creating multi-platform applications with .NET and the Windows App SDK (WinUI), leveraging the Uno Platform (previously here, here and here). In this post we’ll look at the next three sections: Projects, Testing and Features. Projects In addition to the target … Read more

Exploring the Uno Platform Visual Studio Wizard for Creating Apps for the Windows App SDK (WinUI), iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Web

In my previous post on Creating Cross-Platform/Multi-Platform .NET Applications with Windows App SDK (WinUI) and the Uno Platform, I gave a quick introduction to the Visual Studio wizard for creating an Uno Platform application. In this post we’re going to look at using the Default (or recommended) preset configuration and an overview of some of … Read more

Creating Cross-Platform/Multi-Platform .NET Applications with Windows App SDK (WinUI) and the Uno Platform

There are two main options for building applications in .NET and leverage the Windows App SDK, that target multiple platforms (aka cross-platform or multi-platform applications) with is Microsoft’s .NET MAUI and the Uno Platform. Before everyone jumps up and down that I’ve missed Avalonia UI, they don’t fit in this category because they don’t leverage … Read more

How to Disable Individual GridView and ListView Items in a XAML Application (WinUI + Uno Platform)

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

Dotnet (.NET) Performance Tracing for WinUI, Uno and Maui Applications

With the transition from UWP to WinUI and from Xamarin iOS/Android to .NET for iOS and Android, we’re seeing the convergence of application development in the .NET ecosystem. This convergence shouldn’t be undervalued and is particularly evident when you realised that all of these once disparate platforms, can now take advantage of the common tooling … Read more

Debugging Android Applications with the Windows Subsystem for Android

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

Using the Windows App SDK Resource Manager (MRT Core) in Unpackaged Win32 (WinForms/WPF) App.

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