Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
Following from my previous attempt at building a simple app to retrieve the ABN for a business, I figured I’d give lovable.dev a go. This will be a quick post to cover some of the likes/dislikes from this process. Firstly I have to hand it to Lovable, they’ve done a great job with the user … Read more
I figured I’d take some of these AI app builders for a run to see how capable they are. To date I’ve mainly just been taking advantage of the AI capabilities that are progressively being added to VS Code and Visual Studio though tooling such as Copilot but I’m hoping that these AI app builders, … Read more
The default template for a Windows application comes with almost no guidance for how developers should do even basic things like logging. Luckily, the Uno Platform wizard provides a simple way to create an application that configures the Microsoft.Extensions for each of the supported platforms. This includes the ability to setup Microsoft.Extensions.Logging with the ability … Read more
Following my previous posts that introduced the AI Dev Gallery, added AI code to an Uno Platform application and adjusting the AI code to work with Android, in this post we’re going to look at the adjustments required to get the AI code to work on iOS. The issues with iOS aren’t apparent until you … Read more
In the last two posts I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, and then demonstrated how code exported from the AI Dev Gallery can be added to an Uno Platform application. Unfortunately, whilst the code compiles on all the target platforms of the Uno Platform, the application fails to operate … Read more
In my previous post I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, as a way of creating a Windows application that can use AI. In my post I exported the code for object detection, which uses the Faster RCNN 10 model. In this post, we’re going to take this code and … Read more
Recently, Microsoft announced an open-sourced project that they’ve been working on, AI Dev Gallery. Whilst it’s not available on the Microsoft Store as an app you can download, it’s easy enough to clone the repository and run the app. In this post we’ll use the AI Dev Gallery to build a simple Windows application that … Read more
The Figma Windows UI kit file has been updated by the WinUI team. If you’re looking to design an app for Windows (or the Uno Platform), this is a great resource for working with Fluent design. Alternatively if you want to use Material, you can use the Uno Platform Material Toolkit.
Earlier this month Microsoft introduced the preview of Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Abstractions and Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries with the aim of making it easier for .NET developers to integrate AI services into their applications. The Uno Platform provides support for using Microsoft.Extensions in applications that target Windows and any other Uno Platform target (iOS, Android, MacCatalyst etc) via the Uno.Extensions … Read more
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
OAuth2 is quite a common authentication standard for web services to use. Whilst a lot of services have now updated to use OpenID Connect, there are still some, like the Figma api, that still use OAuth2. In this post we’re going to walk through using the Uno.Extensions web authentication package to simplify not only the … 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
In all but the simplest single page application, the layout of an application has to be dynamicaly changed in order to display information, or capture input from the user. Most application frameworks provide a variety of components to make this easy. For example in a WinUI / Windows App SDK application can use a Frame … 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
This has been a work in progress over the last couple of releases in order to deliver a better developer experience for the Uno Platform. The 5.1 release introduced the Uno.Sdk which allowed for better integration with Visual Studio – no more pesky “reload project” warnings appearing. With the 5.2 release the Uno Platform goes … Read more
In my previous post I walked through how to connect to ChatGPT in order to integrate AI into a multi-platform (Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform) based application. In this post we’re going to add the ability to switch which AI model (GPT 3, 4 etc) is used when connecting to ChatGPT. We’ll also cover … Read more