Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
For most of my career, I’ve been a proud Windows developer. I build Windows apps. I run Windows as my primary dev machine. It’s been home. But recently? That’s been challenged — not by another OS, but by AI. Developer workflow is changing fast. Agents, containers, automation — they’re reshaping how we build software. So … Read more
The world of software development has been inverted by the introduction of AI. This started off as an assistive role but quite rapidly AI is taking on more and more autonomy. In fact, the recent hype around Ralph (Ralph Wiggum as a “software engineer”) is evidence enough that whole sections of work can now be … Read more
With every update to the various models and tools, AI becomes more capable and in a lot of ways more independent. In much the same way as a junior developer learns over time and can take on more complex tasks, and can carry the tasks out with less supervision, we’ve seen AI mature to the … Read more
Earlier this year Microsoft was touting all the work they’re putting into Windows in order to make it AI ready. This includes a slew of features that will show up only on their copilot enabled computers. However, there are some features that will be more widely available. One of these is the support added to … Read more
One of the things about software development is that it is still inherently expensive to do; well at least, to do it well. There have been countless attempts to reduce the cost of software development leading to innovation in terms of both tooling and processes. In this post I’m going to discuss the more recent … Read more
In my previous post on Click to Do we created an application that is activated via a URI triggered by Click to Do. In this post we’ll register with Click to Do by implementing the IActionProvider interface and registering as COM Server. As with the previous post on Click to Do, this only works with … Read more
This was going to be a post about using COM Server activation in a WinAppSdk application to interact with Click to Do. However, since there’s currently a major regression in the dev channel of the Windows insider builds (reported here, here and here), which prevents Visual Studio from debugging any applications, that’ll have to wait. … Read more
I’ve talked a lot in the past about how XAML applications lend themselves to being styled using data and control templates. The Uno Platform, which defaults to the Fluent theme, also supports Material, which adjusts the control templates for the in-box controls according to the Material theme from Google. In this post we’re going to … Read more
With the latest generation of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft is integrating AI deep into the core of Windows with features like Recall and Click to Do. In this post we’ll look at Click to Do and how you can use it to launch an Uno Platform application. Before we jump into our Uno Platform application, let’s … Read more
I decided to ask ChatGPT what suggestions it had for building cross platform applications. Here’s it’s response, along with some commentary, specifically around the offering by the Uno Platform. What’s the best guidance for building cross platform applications? From ChatGPT: The best guidance for building cross-platform applications can be broken into strategic decisions, tooling choices, … Read more
As I discussed in my previous post the Uno Platform team have release a subscription based offering, Uno Platform Studio, which includes a runtime visual designer, Hot Design. In this post we’re going to use a new application to launch Hot Design and take a look around. The first thing to be aware of after … Read more
As the .NET ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, so does the need for robust tooling that helps developers build cross-platform applications faster and more efficiently. If you’ve been exploring the Uno Platform ecosystem, you may have come across two offerings: the free, open-source Uno Platform and the paid Uno Platform Studio. While they’re closely … Read more
Quite often I hear the complaint that WinUI, and thus Uno Platform, doesn’t include validation. There was some evidence a while ago that it was being worked on by the WinUI team (ie commented out validation XAML in the WinUI styles), but there doesn’t seem to be any more progress in this area, despite a … Read more
The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern has long been a cornerstone in building maintainable and testable UIs across frameworks like WPF, Xamarin, Uno Platform, and others. It provides a clean separation of concerns and enables powerful data binding. But despite its popularity and maturity, MVVM often introduces unnecessary complexity and friction—particularly when it comes to state management … Read more
In this post we’re going to do two things. Firstly, we’re going to step through how to create an Uno Platform application with VS Code. Then, we’re going to use VS Code to generate an instructions file that will help guide Copilot Chat to generate output that’s more consistent with your application structure. Setting up … Read more
Last week v6.0 of the Uno Platform was released marking the cumulation of a number of years of investment in both the core cross platform framework, as well as the new Uno Platform Studio (including Hot Design), a set of tools that are designed to accelerate your development. In this post we’re going to take … Read more
In the past three posts about working with AI on Windows, we covered connecting to Phi Silica, getting progress response, and building a chat experience. In this post we’re going to improve the styling of the chat by using data templates and including a system message to setup the chat interaction. At the end of the previous … Read more
In the past two posts we covered connecting to Phi Silica and then getting progress response to provide a more real time experience. The next step is to improve the layout of the application to display the prior message history. In this post we’ll cover updating the UI to include a list of prior messages. … Read more
In my previous post I covered the basics of creating an Uno Platform application that consumes Phi Silica in order to build a very basic prompt-response based user interface. When the application was run there was a very evident latency when the button was clicked before the response was presented. In this post we’re going … Read more
Last year Microsoft introduced Phi Silica and recently made an experimental release of the Windows App Sdk that can be used by Windows application to interact with Phi Silica. In this post we’ll connect an Uno Platform application to Phi Silica. We’ll keep things simple and start with the Blank preset in the Uno Platform … Read more