Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
Earlier this year I shared a post, Visual Designer, Hot Reload and Beyond, where I talked about how I thought the future of designers would evolve. Looks like I preempted a new feature that’s coming to Visual Studio 2022 called XAML Live Preview. Currently this is in preview for WPF applications but you can imagine … Read more
In the last couple of years we’ve seen a massive spike in interest around “Hot Reload” thanks to the popularity of frameworks such as React/React Native and more recently, Flutter. The goal of Hot Reload is to allow developers to iteratively change their application code, whilst debugging their application – this cuts down considerably the … Read more
If you look at what Microsoft is working on with Project Reunion, it’s clear to see that they’ve set a vision to reunite the various groups of Windows developers. The aim is not to have every developer using exactly the same technology stack but rather to give every developer access to the richness of the … Read more
With the recent release of Windows UI and support for cross platform offered by the Uno Platform, it’s going to take a little while for the various UWP libraries that we’re familiar with to be ported across. They firstly need to be ported to Windows UI and then they need a Uno build. The Uno … Read more
In my previous post, Multi-Platform PixelPerfect UI with Windows UI and the Uno Platform, I demonstrated how applications built using Project Reunion (i.e. Windows UI), coupled with the Uno Platform, could deliver an identical user experience across a variety of platforms. In this post I’m going to walk through changing the style of one of … Read more
Here’s the upshot – if you’ve been watching the Windows developer space, the hot topic at the moment is Project Reunion, which includes Windows UI and will form the building blocks for apps targeting the Windows platform going forward. And then there’s Windows 10X (“10X“), Microsoft’s latest attempt at a cut down version of the … Read more
When moving from Xamarin.Forms across to WinUI, one of the simpler changes to make is to switch out StackLayout for StackPanel. Or so you’d think – unfortunately StackLayout has some quirky behaviour that needs some extra handling to get right. In this post we’ll look at why the StackPanel replacement doesn’t always work, and what … Read more
A week or so ago David from the XF/Maui team kicked of a thread on twitter challenging devs to add a simple addition to a simple calculator. I particularly liked the transition animation that Robin added, so figured I’d translate this to a WinUI+Uno platform application. I’m going to try to keep as close to … Read more
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
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 … Read more
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 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 synchronize ListBoxes displaying three levels of hierarchical data
One of the things that’s often given me pause for thought is the approach we take to navigation within applications. For the purpose of this post I’m going limit the scope to just XAML based applications (XF/Maui, UWP/WinUI/Uno, WPF). In all of these application platforms there is a built in capability to navigate between pages. … Read more
