Security with Windows Applications and AppContainers

One of the common misconceptions of Windows applications are that they are inherently insecure and that it’s not possible to build and deploy applications that are secure by default. If you look at other platforms, such as iOS and Android, applications have restricted permissions and have to opt in (often requiring explicit user consent) to … Read more

Control the Window of your WinForms, WPF or Windows UI (WinUI) app using the Windows App SDK

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

Getting Started with the Windows App SDK (Preview 2)

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

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

I am a Windows App Developer

With the recent excitement surrounding the announcement of Windows 11, there’s renewed interest in developing apps for the Windows platform. In this post we’re going to celebrate what it means to be a Windows App Developer, regardless of what framework or technology you chose. It’s not going to be an exhaustive list of options but … Read more

Windows 11 and the Windows App SDK

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

Building a Roadmap for Windows Development

If you’re a developer that builds apps using .NET for Windows you’ll be familiar with Microsoft’s attempts to deliver a better developer story. Unfortunately this usually involves learning a new, typically under-baked, technology that in theory will make it easy to deliver better apps for Windows. Whether this was the jump from WinForms to WPF … Read more

WinUI 3.0 Misconceptions

Recently I came across a twitter thread talking about WinUI 3.0 (WinUI3) and how it failed to live up to expectations. Hopefully @JaykeBirdCoding won’t mind me going through his tweets and providing my thoughts – if you get value out of this analysis, please make sure you go follow @JaykeBirdCoding! For anyone else out there … Read more

Trust, Identity and AppContainer for Windows Apps

Following my previous post where I explored different packaging options for Win32 and UWP apps, I realised that there are some options I didn’t mention. In this post I’m going to provide a very quick summary of the options I’ve come across and how they define the running context of an app. Here goes…. Vanilla … Read more

Zero Installer, Zero MSIX, Zero Packaging with .NET Single File Apps

A feature that was added to .NET Core apps was the ability to publish as a single file. As we approach the release of .NET 5 I thought it worthwhile taking a look at the options for publishing Windows Forms and WPF applications with dotnet publish. For this post we’re going to work with a … Read more

XAML Islands Getting Started Guide – Adding UWP Controls to Windows Forms or WPF Application

One of the reasons that Microsoft failed to get wide spread adoption of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is that there is already a massive investment into Windows Forms (WinForms) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. In this post we’re going to walk through how you can use XAML Islands to host UWP controls within an existing WinForms or WPF application.