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

Building a Windows application in a CI/CD pipeline

Most of the documentation and stories related to CI/CD that you read on the internet are about server-side applications: cloud services, APIs, and web applications. One of the reasons (of course, other than because they're very popular and widely adopted) is that they're a perfect fit to build a solid CI/CD story, especially when it comes to deployment. These kinds of applications are hosted on a server, which is exposed through an HTTP endpoint. With the power of the cloud, you can quickly create new servers as needed; for instance, PaaS services such as Azure App Services give you advanced scaling and staging capabilities. Thanks to all of these features, it's quite straightforward to define a pipeline that can automatically deploy a new version of the software in one or more environments, such as a staging server, a production server, and more.

When it comes to Windows desktop applications, it's more challenging...