Trust, Identity and AppContainer for Windows Apps

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 … Read more

Errors with Windows Application Packaging Project

Here’s a quick fix for an error I came across when I’ve been experimenting with various packaging options for WPF (Win32) applications. To set the scene I have a new application, PackagingWPF, that I created based on the WPF Application project template. At this stage I’m not even going to both modifying the application. Next … Read more

Combining .NET 5, WinUI, UWP – FullTrust, PartialTrust, WindowsAppContainer

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 … Read more

Missing Files in Multi-Targeted Project

In the .NET ecosystem there have been a number of different approaches to building libraries that work cross platform (i.e. support building apps for different platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows etc). One of the more recent is to build a multi-targeted project that can light up either different features or just different implementations for … Read more

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