Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
The Figma Windows UI kit file has been updated by the WinUI team. If you’re looking to design an app for Windows (or the Uno Platform), this is a great resource for working with Fluent design. Alternatively if you want to use Material, you can use the Uno Platform Material Toolkit.
In my previous post I looked how the Windows UI 3 Figma file components and variants map to styles and visual states in Windows UI but glosses over some of the details of how resources and in particular, Styles, are defined in Windows UI. To cover this in more detail, in this post we’re going to drill … 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
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
Ok this post took a bit of inspiration from the C# Markup support that’s available for the Uno Platform where it’s easy to build a template selector (for a ListView for example) using a set of Case statements. This got me thinking that there must be a way that we can use a similar technique … Read more
In this post I’m going to experiment using ChatGPT and Copilot to help generate the XAML for pages in a Windows application. Since we’ll be using WinUI and the Windows App SDK, the application can be extended to support other platforms via the Uno Platform. ChatGPT We’ll start by using ChatGPT (in this case ChatGPT v3.5) … 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
For a lot of people if you mention the Uno Platform they would immediately place it in the same bucket as other cross platform, .NET, technologies such as .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) and Avalonia UI and if you’re only interested in the core capability of create apps that run on multiple platforms from a … Read more
The latest 1.5 experimental and preview version of the Windows App SDK contains the much anticipated MapControl. To get started, all you need to do is the following: <Window x:Class=”App2.MainWindow” xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation” xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml”> <Grid> <MapControl x:Name=”mapControl” Width=”800″ Height=”600″ InteractiveControlsVisible=”True” MapServiceToken=”{your map service token}” /> </Grid> </Window> Unfortunately, this doesn’t work out of the box (see GitHub … Read more
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
If you’ve been following the work being done by Microsoft on .NET Aspire you might be curious to see how it works with native client applications built using WinForms, WPF or even WinUI. Late last week Damian Edwards pushed samples for WinForms and WPF and I just created a PR that adds WinUI. The sample … 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
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
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
In the next few posts we’re going to be looking at the TubePlayer sample application for the Uno Platform. For this post we’re going to focus on using Uno.Extensions to add dependency injection to an Uno Platform application. Uno.Extensions builds on the awesome work that Microsoft has done with the Microsoft.Extensions that provides capabilities such … Read more
Just over a week ago the Uno Platform released v5.0 which was another significant update, following the 4.10 release that included Adding .NET MAUI Controls to an Existing Uno-Platform Application, and some awesome support for shadows. In this post we’re going to do a wrap up of the release and look at trajectory of the platform. … Read more
I was discussing the features of the Uno Platform today and realised that we sometimes gloss over all the features. In this post we’re going to do a walk through of some of the different controls, styles and themes available to Windows (WinUI/Windows App SDK) and Uno Platform developers. Gallery One of the best ways … Read more
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
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
One of the more complex parts of building an application is getting navigation to work. In a Windows application (or in a multi-platform application using the Uno Platform) you can easily navigate between pages using Frame.Navigate and Frame.GoBack but what if you want to use a more complex navigation structure like tabs or a NavigationView. … Read more