Windows

Building a Roadmap for Windows Development

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If you’re a developer that builds apps using .NET for Windows you’ll be familiar with Microsoft’s attempts to deliver a better developer story. Unfortunately this usually involves learning a new, typically under-baked, technology that in theory will make it easy to deliver better apps for Windows. Whether this was the jump from WinForms to WPF … Read more

Using ImageSharp in your WinUI – Uno Cross Platform App

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ImageSharp WinUI Uno

This post originated from a tweet demonstrating how easily you can use the ImageSharp library in a Blazor server side app to generate images. In this post I’ll show how we can reuse the same code plus WinUI+Uno to generate images for iOS, Android, Windows (Desktop+UWP) and Web (WASM) I figured it’d be easy enough … Read more

WinUI 3.0 Misconceptions

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Recently I came across a twitter thread talking about WinUI 3.0 (WinUI3) and how it failed to live up to expectations. Hopefully @JaykeBirdCoding won’t mind me going through his tweets and providing my thoughts – if you get value out of this analysis, please make sure you go follow @JaykeBirdCoding! For anyone else out there … Read more

Unpackaged Windows Apps with Identity using a Sparse Package

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In my previous post I made a passing reference to the use of sparse packages to allow unpackaged Windows applications to acquire an identity. In this post we’re going to walk through creating a sparse package and attaching it to an unpackaged Windows application. Before we get into it I want to link to a … Read more

Trust, Identity and AppContainer for Windows Apps

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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

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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

XAML Islands Getting Started Guide – Adding UWP Controls to Windows Forms or WPF Application

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One of the reasons that Microsoft failed to get wide spread adoption of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is that there is already a massive investment into Windows Forms (WinForms) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. In this post we’re going to walk through how you can use XAML Islands to host UWP controls within an existing WinForms or WPF application.