Book Image

Learn WinUI 3 - Second Edition

By : Alvin Ashcraft
5 (2)
Book Image

Learn WinUI 3 - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Alvin Ashcraft

Overview of this book

WinUI 3 takes a whole new approach to delivering Windows UI components and controls and has the ability to deliver the same features across multiple versions of Windows. Learn WinUI 3 is a comprehensive introduction to WinUI and Windows apps for anyone who is new to WinUI and XAML applications. This updated second edition begins by helping you get to grips with the latest features in WinUI and shows you how XAML is used in UI development. The next set of chapters will help you set up a new Visual Studio environment, develop a new desktop project, incorporate the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in a WinUI project, and develop unit tests for ViewModel commands. Next, you’ll cover the basics of data access from WinUI projects with a step-by-step approach. As you advance, you’ll discover how to leverage the Fluent Design System to design beautiful WinUI applications. You’ll also explore the contents and capabilities of the Windows Community Toolkit and learn how to create cross-platform apps with markup and code from your project using Uno Platform. The concluding chapters will teach you how to build, debug, and deploy apps to the Microsoft Store. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to build WinUI applications from scratch and how to modernize existing desktop apps using WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Introduction to WinUI and Windows Applications
8
Part 2:Extending WinUI and Modernizing Applications
13
Part 3:Build and Deploy on Windows and Beyond

Pinpointing data binding failures

While debugging data binding problems is not as difficult in WinUI and UWP as it is in WPF (if you use x:Bind-compiled bindings), there are still some gotchas to avoid. In this section, we will look at what can go wrong in views and ViewModels and how you can diagnose and fix the problems.

Common mistakes in data binding

If you use x:Bind, the compiler will evaluate whether you’re binding to a valid source and can give you the peace of mind of knowing that your views and ViewModels are hooked up correctly, but there is still a lot that can go wrong. Let’s review a few of the most common mistakes.

Selecting the best binding mode

We have seen in previous chapters that the default mode for most controls with x:Bind is OneTime, while the default for Binding is OneWay. Defaulting to OneTime helps with performance as many read-only properties are only ever set when the view is first created. However, if you forget to change this...