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

Exploring frameworks and libraries

MVVM is an architectural pattern, not a library or a framework. However, when you start adopting the MVVM pattern in a real project, you need to have a series of building blocks that can help you speed up the implementation, by avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel at each step. In the previous section, we have seen one of these scenarios: each ViewModel class must implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, otherwise, the connection between the View and the ViewModel would be broken.

This is where libraries and frameworks become helpful: they give you a set of ready-to-use building blocks that you can use to quickly start building all the components of your application. The library we're going to leverage in the examples of this chapter is called the MVVM Toolkit and is a part of the Windows Community Toolkit from Microsoft. It's the spiritual successor of the MVVM Light Toolkit by Laurent Bugnion, one of the most popular MVVM...