Book Image

Modernizing Your Windows Applications with the Windows App SDK and WinUI

By : Matteo Pagani, Marc Plogas
5 (1)
Book Image

Modernizing Your Windows Applications with the Windows App SDK and WinUI

5 (1)
By: Matteo Pagani, Marc Plogas

Overview of this book

If you're a developer looking to improve and modernize your existing LOB applications to leverage modern Windows features without having to rewrite the entire application from scratch, this book is for you. You’ll learn how to modernize your existing Windows Forms, WPF, and UWP applications and enrich them with the latest Windows features. Starting with sample LOB applications that cover common scenarios, you'll learn the differences between various components and then focus on design features for improved visual aspects like accessibility and responsive layouts. The book shows you how to enhance your existing applications using Windows App SDK components and various Windows APIs, resulting in deeper integration with the operating system. You’ll be taking a closer look at WinML, which enables Windows applications to evaluate machine learning models offline and leverage the power of your machine, or notifications, to engage with your users in a more effective way. You’ll also learn how to make your application deployment-ready by distributing it using various platforms like the Microsoft Store or websites. By the end of this Windows book, you'll be able to create a migration plan for your existing Windows applications and put your knowledge to work by enhancing your application with new features and integrating them with the Windows ecosystem.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Basic Concepts
3
Section 2: Modernization Journey
9
Section 3: Integrating Your App with the Windows Ecosystem
14
Section 4: Distributing Your Application

Summary

Notifications is one of the areas where a native application has a significant advantage compared to a web application, especially on Windows. Web applications and browsers provide some limited support for notifications, but it's only thanks to the rich Windows ecosystem that you can enable all the features we have seen in this chapter—images, interactions, progress bars, reminders. Thanks to these features, we can build more engaging applications, which can interact with the user even when they aren't actively using them.

However, be careful when you decide to implement them. Notifications can quickly turn from the most useful feature provided by an application to the most annoying one if they are abused. Don't use notifications for advertising or for delivering information that isn't critical or time sensitive.

In the next chapter, we're going to learn another exciting opportunity that the Windows ecosystem provides for our application...