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

Creating a responsive layout

One of the most powerful features of WinUI, compared to other Microsoft UI frameworks, such as WPF and Windows Forms, is the built-in support for responsive layouts. Even if WinUI applications are tailored mainly for desktop devices, there are many scenarios where it's important to let the application scale properly: big screens, monitors with high resolution, applications running in a smaller window, and so on. In these situations, your application must react accordingly, so that the content presented to the user can always be meaningful.

When building the layout of your application, there are some aspects that Windows will take care of for you, and some others that must be manually tweaked by the developer.

Let's start by analyzing the first category.

Using effective pixels

One of the biggest challenges when using technologies such as WPF or Windows Forms is that all the sizes you set are translated into screen pixels. For example...