Book Image

Learn WinUI 3.0

By : Alvin Ashcraft
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn WinUI 3.0

5 (1)
By: Alvin Ashcraft

Overview of this book

WinUI 3.0 takes a whole new approach to delivering Windows UI components and controls, and is able to deliver the same features on more than one version of Windows 10. Learn WinUI 3.0 is a comprehensive introduction to WinUI and Windows apps for anyone who is new to WinUI, Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and XAML applications. The book begins by helping you get to grips with the latest features in WinUI and shows you how XAML is used in UI development. You'll then set up a new Visual Studio environment and learn how to create a new UWP project. Next, you'll find out how to incorporate the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in a WinUI project and develop unit tests for ViewModel commands. Moving on, you'll cover the Windows Template Studio (WTS) new project wizard and WinUI libraries in a step-by-step way. As you advance, you'll discover how to leverage the Fluent Design system to create beautiful WinUI applications. You'll also explore the contents and capabilities of the Windows Community Toolkit and learn to create a new UWP user control. Toward the end, the book will teach you how to build, debug, unit test, deploy, and monitor apps in production. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build WinUI applications from scratch and modernize existing WPF and WinForms applications using WinUI controls.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to WinUI and Windows Applications
8
Section 2: Extending WinUI and Modernizing Applications
13
Section 3: Build and Deploy on Windows and Beyond

Using controls from the toolkit

We explored a handful of the WCT controls in the sample app in the previous section. Now, it's time to use them in a WinUI project. To demonstrate some of the controls in action, we are going to create a new WinUI in Desktop project, built on .NET 5. You should be familiar with this project type from our work in Chapter 8, Building WinUI Applications with .NET 5.

Note

At the time of writing, the WCT controls can only be used with WinUI in Desktop projects built on .NET 5. The compatibility of WCT with WinUI on UWP is not expected until sometime after the WinUI 3.0 RTM release.

Creating the WinUI in Desktop project

To start our WCT project, you will have to launch Visual Studio and follow these steps:

  1. Create a new project. Then, on the Create a new project page, enter WinUI in Desktop in the search field.
  2. Several project types will be displayed, but one of the top results will be Blank App, Packaged (WinUI in Desktop). Select...