Windows

XAML Basics for WPF, UWP, Uno and WinUI

by

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

DotNetMaui (Xamarin.Forms) is Not a XAML Platform

by

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

Building Messages in Blend for Visual Studio

by

The other day Martin Zikmond tweeted about a messaging sample app he’d built using the Uno Platform, allowing the same app to run on iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS and Web. Whilst the concept was simple enough, the point was that there was almost no platform specific code and yet the app works and looks virtually … Read more

Windows (UWP) Designer in Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio

by

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)

by

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

Consuming REST API with Swagger / OpenAPI in Xamarin and Uno Applications

by

I still recall the simplicity of standing up a SOAP service and adding a service reference via Visual Studio by simply entering the url to the WSDL – this scenario just worked…. until we moved on. There was a rapid progression away from the overly prescriptive XML based world of SOAP to REST based APIs. … Read more

Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects

by

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

by

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

Microsoft Build 2020: Uno Platform + WinUI = Future of Cross Platform Apps

by

I’ve been a long time supporter of the work that the team at Uno Platform have been doing. The announcement today of v3.0 of the Uno Platform comes hot on the heals of releases 2.3 and 2.4 that introduced AndroidX and MacOS support. This isn’t just any old announcement, v3 aligns the Uno Platform with … Read more

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 4 – Custom Shadows

by

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