Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
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
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
Following on from the posts on Dependency Injection, Logging and Configuration, in this post we’re going to look at how data can be persisted between sessions using Settings within a Windows or Uno Platform application. This series makes use of Uno.Extensions in order to initialize the services that are required by the application. At the end of the … Read more
Following on from Dependency Injection and Logging, in this post we’re going to configure the IHostBuilder to load and access configuration information within a Windows or Uno Platform application. We’ll pick up where we left off with the IHostBuilder setup to switch environments and configure logging. var builder = this.CreateBuilder(args) .Configure(host => host #if DEBUG … Read more
In my previous post I covered Dependency Injection for Windows and Uno Platform Applications which covered creating a new application and adding dependency injection using the Uno.Extensions which leverages the Microsoft Extensions IHostBuilder to create an IHost instance. In this post we’re going to adjust the IHostBuilder to setup Logging support. We’re going to start … Read more
In the next few posts we’re going to be looking at the TubePlayer sample application for the Uno Platform. For this post we’re going to focus on using Uno.Extensions to add dependency injection to an Uno Platform application. Uno.Extensions builds on the awesome work that Microsoft has done with the Microsoft.Extensions that provides capabilities such … Read more
Just over a week ago the Uno Platform released v5.0 which was another significant update, following the 4.10 release that included Adding .NET MAUI Controls to an Existing Uno-Platform Application, and some awesome support for shadows. In this post we’re going to do a wrap up of the release and look at trajectory of the platform. … Read more
I was discussing the features of the Uno Platform today and realised that we sometimes gloss over all the features. In this post we’re going to do a walk through of some of the different controls, styles and themes available to Windows (WinUI/Windows App SDK) and Uno Platform developers. Gallery One of the best ways … Read more
In case you haven’t seen the release notes or the blog post the 4.10 release for the Uno Platform was pretty huge with a couple of big features shipping in this release. One of these features was .NET MAUI Embedding with allows any .NET MAUI Control to be embedded within an Uno Platform application. If … Read more
One of the things that has always impressed me was the ability to pair Visual Studio running on Windows to a Mac and be able to debug on either a real device, or on a simulator. There’s even a remote simulator which will display the simulator on Windows, meaning I never have to open, or … Read more
The Windows Community Toolkit is in pre-release of v8 – full details of their announcement here. With the new consolidated structure, there are packages for both UWP and WinUI but more importantly both sets of packages also target the Uno Platform. In this post we’re going to walk through adding one of the components from … Read more
Earlier this week Six Labors announced the release of ImageSharp.Drawing v1.0 and it made me wonder whether this could be used as an alternative to Skia for controls that want to do custom rendering in a Windows, or multi-platform Uno Platform, application. For Skia there are already Uno (which includes Windows/WinUI) views (see source here) … 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 the past three posts (Getting Started, Comparison with MVVM and Incremental Loading) I’ve talked about the use of Model-View-Update-eXtended (MVUX). In this post we’re going look at feeds, which is one of the key components of MVUX. What’s a Feed In simple terms, a feed represents a stream of values, much like an Observable … 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
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
As Windows, continues to apply the Fluent design language across various aspects of the underlying operating system, Microsoft is also looking to apply it to other first party applications. According to this post on their blog, Visual Studio is the next application to be hit by designers and not everyone is happy (check out comments … Read more