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

Moving to a new namespace

When you are building an application with UWP, your home is the Windows namespace. Every API that belongs to this ecosystem is included in one of its subnamespaces. One of the most important is Windows.UI.Xaml, which includes all the building blocks to create the UI: controls, dependency properties, styles, and so on.

When moving the UI layer to the Windows App SDK, the team had to create a different namespace, to avoid conflicts with the one built inside the operating system. As such, all the UI building blocks for WinUI are included in the Microsoft.UI.Xaml namespace. Compared to a traditional UWP application, this introduces the following two main changes:

  • If you want to port over some code you have created in UWP, you will have to change every reference to the Windows.* namespace to Microsoft.*.
  • When you create a new WinUI application, you will find the following declaration inside the App.xaml file:
    <Application>
       ...