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

Understanding WinUI and Windows App SDK

Let’s review the WinUI controls available to use in our project and see how they can help us build the My Media Collection application. The Microsoft.WindowsAppSDK package we saw in Solution Explorer earlier in the chapter contains these controls and much more.

To view the contents of this package, open the Object Browser window from Visual Studio’s View menu. The controls will be listed here under several namespaces inside the Microsoft.WinUI tree node, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.13 – WinUI controls in Object Browser

Figure 2.13 – WinUI controls in Object Browser

The majority of WinUI controls we will be using can be found inside the Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Controls namespace under Microsoft.WinUI, along with other related classes and interfaces.

So far, we have used in our application the Grid, TextBlock, and ListView controls. Open the Object Browser window from the View menu. Then, find the ListView class, expand...