Windows Packages (APPX, MSIX etc) are a Band-Aid Solution

The Windows platform supports a number of different development frameworks (WinForms, WPF, UWP etc) and a number of different deployment models (xcopy, appx, msix etc). In this post we’re going to take a look at why the current trend for packaging Windows applications is a stop-gap, a temporary solution to the problem of application management … Read more

What’s the correlation between .NET 5, WinUI and MAUI (Xamarin.Forms)

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

Start and Restart Windows (UWP/WinUI) Applications on Windows Startup

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 … Read more

Persisting Cloud Events to Cosmos DB in Azure

If you start down the path of implementing Event Sourcing, you’ll most likely come across https://cloudevents.io/ which has the tag line “A specification for describing event data in a common way”. This project seems to be well supported (take a look at the contributors list) and has language projections for a number of different languages. … Read more

Zero Installer, Zero MSIX, Zero Packaging with .NET Single File Apps

A feature that was added to .NET Core apps was the ability to publish as a single file. As we approach the release of .NET 5 I thought it worthwhile taking a look at the options for publishing Windows Forms and WPF applications with dotnet publish. For this post we’re going to work with a … Read more

Experimenting with .NET 5 Target Framework Names and the Windows platform

Firstly, if you haven’t been following the development of .NET 5 then you should definitely download the latest Visual Studio preview and .NET 5 preview SDK today. Next, you should follow the blogs from the dotnet team and specifically the post by Immo that discusses the future of .NET Standard. The post doesn’t just cover … Read more

XAML Islands Getting Started Guide – Adding UWP Controls to Windows Forms or WPF Application

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.