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

Reusing multiple resources with styles

So far, we have explored simple resources, which are made by a single XAML element. However, XAML supports also more complex types of resources, such as styles. If you are familiar with web development, XAML styles and CSS styles are similar, since they serve the same purpose – group together a set of resources so that you can apply all of them just by referencing the style.

This is an example of what a style looks like:

<Style x:Key="HeaderText" TargetType="TextBlock">
    <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Red" />
    <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="24" />
</Style>

As with a single resource, a style is identified by a name assigned to the x:Key property. However, we can also see a couple of important differences:

  • We must specify a property called TargetType, which specifies the control type...