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

Exchanging messages between different classes

Splitting the application into different domains independent of each other provides many great advantages, but it also creates a few challenges. For example, there are scenarios where you need to exchange data between two ViewModels; or you need the ViewModel to communicate with the View to trigger an operation on the UI layer, such as starting an animation.

Creating a dependency between multiple elements would break the MVVM pattern, so we must find another solution. One of the most adopted solutions to support these scenarios is the Publisher-Subscriber pattern, which enables every class in the application to exchange messages. What makes this pattern a great fit for applications built with the MVVM patterns is that these messages aren't tightly coupled: a publisher can send a message without knowing who the subscribers are, and subscribers can receive messages without knowing who the publisher is.

Let's see a concrete...