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

Discovering application packaging and MSIX basics

For most of this book, we have been building and running our applications locally. We have touched on some packaging concepts in Chapter 8, Building WinUI Apps with .NET 5, and deployment with App Center in Chapter 13, Building, Releasing, and Monitoring Applications with Visual Studio App Center. Now, it's time to build on those concepts and gain a deeper understanding of packaging and deploying WinUI applications.

Why package your application? Well, an application package is currently required for WinUI applications to be installed in Windows. This requirement will likely change as Project Reunion and WinUI applications evolve. Today, when you run a WinUI project in Visual Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) creates a package and deploys it locally. Packaging serves several other important purposes, outlined as follows:

  • Providing a clean uninstall: A packaging system ensures that any files installed...