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

Supporting navigation

When you start to build a real application, navigation is one of the first key topics you must address. Other than a very few specific scenarios, in most cases, the application you're going to build will have multiple screens. In WinUI, there are different containers for your layouts:

  • Window: This is the main host of your application. Theoretically, a Window control can directly contain content, but it has a few limitations. It doesn't expose a DataContext, it doesn't expose life cycle events (such as Loaded), and it doesn't support navigation. As such, in real-world applications, the Window object acts just as the main container of your application.
  • Page: The Page object is the most used container for the content of your application, since it supports features such as DataContext and life cycle events. A real-world application typically has multiple pages, and the user can navigate from one to another by using the navigation menu...