Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
Designing applications for Windows and the Uno Platform can be difficult if you attempt to start from a clean slate and assume that you have to design everything from the ground up. This would require you to design even simple elements like a TextBox and a Button. After designing each element, a developer would then … Read more
This post is going to walk through using the Microsoft tool, Kiota, to generate client code from a Swagger / OpenAPI definition that can be used within a Windows (WinUI/Windows App Sdk) / Uno Platform application. Ok, so let’s backup a little – firstly, Swagger / OpenAPI (see description) is used to describe service endpoints. … Read more
Out of the box, applications built using WinUI / Windows App Sdk or the Uno Platform have access to a wide range of controls, such as Frame, TabBar and NavigationView that can be used for navigation. However, there’s no common pattern/metaphor that makes it navigate within an application. Uno.Extensions includes Navigation which provides a consistent abstraction for … Read more
The Uno Platform supports many third party control libraries, such as Mapsui and LiveCharts, but sometimes there are components that you want to use that haven’t been adapted to work with Uno. For this, you can turn to .NET MAUI Embedding which allows for any .NET MAUI control to be hosted within an Uno Platform … Read more
In today’s digital world, integrating AI into your applications has become increasingly important. One powerful AI model that you can leverage is OpenAI’s GPT, known for its natural language processing capabilities. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the process of connecting your Windows app to ChatGPT using the Microsoft Azure.AI.OpenAI library, allowing you … Read more
As with all software managing dependencies in often a lot harder than it seems, particularly when there are conflicting priorities. In this post I’m going to talk about some of the challenges developers face relating to dependencies when building Windows and cross/multi platform applications using .NET, the Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform. I’ll … 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
Last week, the Uno Platform officially launched their Figma Plugin which works in parity with the Uno Platform Material Toolkit to support both designers and developers with the process of designing applications. If you haven’t already, check out the announcement post that provides a high level overview of both the plugin and toolkit. In this post we’ll … Read more
One of the common misconceptions of Windows applications are that they are inherently insecure and that it’s not possible to build and deploy applications that are secure by default. If you look at other platforms, such as iOS and Android, applications have restricted permissions and have to opt in (often requiring explicit user consent) to … Read more
I figured I’d start the year off with a quick thought post on where things are at with building apps for Windows. As Windows rapidly approaches the 4 decade mark, you’d expect there to be a well defined model for building apps. Instead we’re still realing from the years of missteps and indecision by Microsoft. … 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
In the previous post I walked through creating an application using MVVM and the MVUX (developed by the Uno Platform) to give an overview comparison of the two frameworks. In this post, I’m going to explain a bit more about MVUX and I’m going to use MVVM as a point of reference. Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Let’s … 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 things that sets WinUI apart from other UI frameworks is that provides a declarative way to define visual states for a control or a page. It also allows for the transitions between states to be defined. In this post we’re going to cover how to define both transitions and state animations and … 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