Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
For most of my career, I’ve been a proud Windows developer. I build Windows apps. I run Windows as my primary dev machine. It’s been home. But recently? That’s been challenged — not by another OS, but by AI. Developer workflow is changing fast. Agents, containers, automation — they’re reshaping how we build software. So … Read more
Quite often I hear the complaint that WinUI, and thus Uno Platform, doesn’t include validation. There was some evidence a while ago that it was being worked on by the WinUI team (ie commented out validation XAML in the WinUI styles), but there doesn’t seem to be any more progress in this area, despite a … Read more
Last week v6.0 of the Uno Platform was released marking the cumulation of a number of years of investment in both the core cross platform framework, as well as the new Uno Platform Studio (including Hot Design), a set of tools that are designed to accelerate your development. In this post we’re going to take … Read more
XAML is often criticised for being verbose, hard to read and unnecessary as an additional language for defining the interface for an application. This feedback has lead to the creation of C# markup which works with both Windows UI / Windows App SDK and Uno Platform applications. However, I find that the declarative nature and … Read more
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
In a previous post I covered using Figma to design and develop applications for Windows and the Uno Platform. This was a high level post that didn’t get into either Figma files (Fluent and Material) in much detail. One thing that is common to both files is the use of components, and component variants, to … 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
In my first post in this sequence on MVVM and MVUX we built out a simple application that searched movies in The Mobile Database (TMDB) using the text entered to match against the movie title. What’s interesting about the TMDB api is that the search results are actually paginated with the initial request only returning … Read more
The purpose of this post is two fold, firstly to provide an introduction to Model-View-Update-eXtended (MVUX), as developed by the Uno Platform, and secondly to provide a comparison to the more traditional Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) approach to building XAML-based applications. In order to do this, we’ll first walk through building a simple MVVM based application where … Read more
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
In writing my previous post on Implicit and Explicit Styles in XAML I was reminded of a bug in the definition of the DefaultButtonStyle which prevents you setting the Foreground colour of a Button. The issue is documented, along with the fix, in this issue but for whatever reason (and I can’t think of one … Read more
I’ve touched on implicit and explicit styles a couple of times in previous posts (eg here and here) when talking about XAML styles. In this post I wanted to provide a more detailed explanation on what implicit and explict styles are and how they should be used in XAML to style controls. In discussing style … Read more