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

MVVM libraries for WinUI

When working with MVVM in WinUI applications, you must create a little infrastructure code to facilitate data binding between Views and View Models. You can either write this yourself or choose a framework that abstracts this plumbing code away from your application. Although we will start by writing our own plumbing code for the application in the next section, let’s review some popular MVVM frameworks for WinUI.

The MVVM Toolkit

We will discuss the Windows Community Toolkit (WCT) and .NET Community Toolkit in more detail in Chapter 9, Enhancing Applications with the Windows Community Toolkit, but one of the libraries included in this open source toolkit is the MVVM Toolkit. The toolkit supports any .NET application platform, including UWP, WinUI 3, .NET MAUI, Uno Platform, WPF, and others. You can get the CommunityToolkit.Mvvm NuGet package through the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio or view its details on the NuGet website, at https:...