Getting Started with Platform Uno

A while ago I posted on Building a TipCalc using Platform Uno and at the time there was quite a few steps to jump through to get a basic application running from scratch. In this post I’m going to cover off how incredibly easy it now is to get started with the Uno Platform. Before I get into the steps, I want to give some background on why after almost a year am I coming back to looking at Uno. For those who have been reading my blog or have worked with Built to Roam you’ll know that we specialise in building cross-platform applications, whether it be a mobile app spanning iOS and Android, a Windows app targeting desktop and Xbox, or an enterprise solution that’s available across web, mobile and desktop. With a deep heritage in the Microsoft ecosystem we have seen the emergence of technologies such as Xamarin.Forms – historically this was rudimentary framework for rapidly developing forms based applications, primarily for line of business solutions. We’ve also seen other frameworks emerge such as React Native, Flutter and of course PWAs. Each framework has its advantaged and disadvantages; each framework uses a unique set of tools, workflow and languages. The question we continually ask ourselves is which framework is going to provide the best value for our customers and that will allow us to build user interfaces that include high fidelity controls and rich animation.

We also evaluate frameworks based on the target platforms that they support, which is what has led me to this post. One of the amazing things about Xamarin.Forms is that it has provided support for the three main platforms, iOS, Android and Windows, as part of the core platform. In fact the tag line is currently “Native UIs for iOS, Android and Windows from a single, shared codebase”.

What’s mind blowing is if you look at the Other Platforms page you’ll see that there is also support for GTK, Mac, Tizen and WPF. Unfortunately, these other platforms do not get the same love as the core platforms, so don’t expect them to be kept up to date with the latest releases.

At this point you might be thinking, why stray from Xamarin.Forms? Well in recent times there has been a shift away from supporting UWP as a core component of Xamarin.Forms. When asked on Twitter about UWP support for Shell, David Ortinau’s response was just another nail in the coffin for UWP app developers who are already struggling an up hill battle to convince customers of the value proposition of building for Windows.

So this leads me to again revisit other frameworks but we find the situation isn’t much better:

• React Native – iOS and Android only – There is a React Native for Windows but again, it’s not part of the core offering, so it will trail (perhaps not by much but the commit history indicates a difference between 1 day ago for the main Reach Native repo and 26 days ago on the Windows repo, for the most recent commit).
• Flutter – iOS and Android only – There is work on desktop embedding and having Flutter work on the web, so perhaps we’ll see more support beyond Google I/O
• PWAs – varying level of support on different platforms – Clearly Microsoft sees this as the path forward for some of their Office suite of apps but the lack of native UI I think is still a limitation of PWAs.

At this point I remembered that Uno provided an interesting take on cross platform development. I also remembered that they’ve been doing a lot of work to support WebAssembly, so perhaps this could be the perfect solution. In the simplest form, the Uno Platform is #uwpeverywhere (an initiative that I’ve long believed Microsoft should have championed, after all it’s called Universal for a reason, right?) but beyond that Uno is about being able to “Build native apps for Mobile and Web using XAML and C#”.

Let’s get cracking with building a Uno application and see how it pans out. If you’re on the Uno Platform homepage and wondering how to get started, don’t worry, you’re not alone – I was looking for a big “Get Started” button but instead I see links to sample apps and to the source code. If you find yourself across at the source code, you’re about to embark down the wrong path – you don’t need to grab their source code as everything is distributed via nuget! So where do you go? Well you need to find the Uno Documentation and then click the link to Getting Started – now we’re cooking with gas! Unfortunately most of this page is pretty useless until you come to want to debug your application on WebAssembly. Instead what you really want to do i install the Uno Visual Studio Extension and use that to create your application.

Getting Started

• Install the Uno Visual Studio Extension
• Open Visual Studio and select File, New, Project
• Search for “cross platform” and select the Cross-Platform App (Uno Platform) template

• Important: Update nuget package references – if you don’t do this, it’s unlikely that your application will run as a WebAssembly (check the “Include prerelease” to get the latest update for Wasm support)

• For WebAssembly in the csproj file:
• Add <DotNetCliToolReference Include=”Uno.Wasm.Bootstrap.Cli” Version=”1.0.0-dev.214″ /> into the same ItemGroup as the PackageReference for Uno.Wasm.Bootstrap
• Add <MonoRuntimeDebuggerEnabled>true</MonoRuntimeDebuggerEnabled> to the initial PropertyGroup
• Change the Project element to <Project Sdk=”Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web”>
• Build and run each platform – I’m showing UWP, Android and WebAssembly here but iOS works straight from the template too

So, now that we have a UWP application that runs on iOS, Android, Windows and Web, are we satisfied with this as a cross platform solution? I think I’m enjoying working in UWP again but it’ll take a bit more investigation to see if this is a viable solution or not.

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Contact Built to Roam for more information on building cross-platform applications

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