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

Managing the states of a control

In the previous section, we saw a glimpse of a new important concept in XAML – visual states. A visual state is a way to represent the look and feel of a control in a specific situation. For example, a Button control can be pressed, disabled, or highlighted. In all these states, Button has a different aspect than the default one, as you can see in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.7 – The various states of a Button control

The power of visual states is that they simplify the management of the various states that a control can assume, since you don't have to specify the whole template each time. A visual state just specifies the differences compared to the default template of the control.

As an example, let's take a look at the VisualState definition called Pressed of a Button control:

<VisualState x:Name="Pressed">
    <Storyboard>
    ...