Building amazing cross-platform solutions for iOS, Android and Windows
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 … Continue reading “Colors, Styles and Templates in Windows UI (WinUI)”
The next 6-12 months are going to be super exciting with both preview and releases planned for WinUI, Project Reunion and Maui (aka Xamarin.Forms). WinUI/Reunion represent a significant decoupling for Windows apps from the underlying OS version. Meanwhile Maui will provide a bit of a reset for Xamarin.Forms which some major improvements to the way … Continue reading “Breaking a Developer Ecosystem by Changing a Namespace”
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 … Continue reading “Building a Roadmap for Windows Development”
This post originated from a tweet demonstrating how easily you can use the ImageSharp library in a Blazor server side app to generate images. In this post I’ll show how we can reuse the same code plus WinUI+Uno to generate images for iOS, Android, Windows (Desktop+UWP) and Web (WASM) I figured it’d be easy enough … Continue reading “Using ImageSharp in your WinUI – Uno Cross Platform App”
Preview 4 of WinUI3.0 dropped recently and if you want to get started you’ll need the preview of Visual Studio and the WinUI project templates. One of the things I noticed was that some of the tool windows I was used to from UWP weren’t working as I expected. I recall hearing that Microsoft had … Continue reading “WinUI 3.0 Debugging Tooling with Visual Studio”
As we get close to preview 4 of WinUI 3.0 (it’s Feb 2021 already so where’s my WinUI preview4!), now’s the time to start looking at how you’re going to upgrade your UWP application to WinUI3.0. In this post we’ll look at a migration approach that will allow you to keep your UWP app running … Continue reading “How to Upgrade a UWP Application to WinUI 3.0”
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 … Continue reading “WinUI 3.0 Misconceptions”
In my previous post I made a passing reference to the use of sparse packages to allow unpackaged Windows applications to acquire an identity. In this post we’re going to walk through creating a sparse package and attaching it to an unpackaged Windows application. Before we get into it I want to link to a … Continue reading “Unpackaged Windows Apps with Identity using a Sparse Package”
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 … Continue reading “Trust, Identity and AppContainer for Windows Apps”
As Microsoft progresses towards the first release of WinUI3 and in parallel invests into Project Reunion, the gap between Win32 based applications (eg WinForms, WPF) and UWP applications is being eroded. In this post we’re going to look at the role of trust, identity, capabilities and the Windows App Container, and how they relate to … Continue reading “Combining .NET 5, WinUI, UWP – FullTrust, PartialTrust, WindowsAppContainer”
This week I’ve been looking further into where WinUI3 is at and specifically how it relates to both Win32 and UWP applications. Along this journey I ran into a slight issue with WinUI3 for Desktop application that simply wouldn’t run if I published and then installed the package. In this post I’m going to walk … Continue reading “Packaging a WinUI3 Desktop Application”
Over the last couple of years there have been a couple of key developments in the .NET world. However, despite a lot of rhetoric from Microsoft about building a better developer ecosystem, the reality is that the current landscape for building apps using .NET is a mess and no amount of sugar coating is going … Continue reading “What’s the correlation between .NET 5, WinUI and MAUI (Xamarin.Forms)”
A while ago Windows introduced a little-known feature that allows applications to automatically restart when Windows is restarted. However, rather than just look at this feature, which Windows app developer get for free, in this post we’re going to look at different options for starting and restarting a Windows application when Windows starts/restarts. Launch on … Continue reading “Start and Restart Windows (UWP/WinUI) Applications on Windows Startup”
This post will explores mvvm navigation further, employing the latest c# 9 code generator to reduce the boilerplate code that developers have to write.
How to implement custom grouping
How to display grouped data in a TreeView
How to sort groups of data items
How to display items in an ItemsControl using different templates
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.
How to implement a data bound dialog box
