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 actions with commands

Let's go back to the starting point of our journey into the MVVM pattern: a page where users can fill in their names and surnames. By adding properties and implementing the INotifyPropertyChanged interface in the ViewModel, we have been able to remove the tight connection between the UI layer and code-behind class when it comes to storing and retrieving the data. But what about the action? Our previous example has a Button control with an event handler, which includes the code to save the data. However, this is another XAML scenario that creates a deep connection between the code-behind class and the UI layer: an event handler can only be declared in the code-behind. We can't declare it in our ViewModel, where the data we need (the name and surname) is actually stored.

It's time to introduce commands, which are a way to express actions not with an event handler, but through a regular property. This scenario is enabled by a built-in...