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

Reviewing what’s new in WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK

Although WinUI 3 is a major release, the number of new features, as compared to WinUI 2.x, is not extensive. That may be surprising to many people, but simply creating WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK as a standalone release was quite an undertaking. We’ll look at the most significant features in the following subsections.

Backward compatibility

To make WinUI applications compatible with more versions of Windows (it works with Windows 10, version 1809 and later), the WinUI team had to extract the UWP controls from the Windows SDK and move them to the new Microsoft.UI.* libraries in the Windows App SDK. The result of this work not only creates compatibility with more versions of Windows but also enables developers to consume WinUI, regardless of whether they are using .NET or Win32 as the underlying platform. C# developers can build .NET apps with WinUI for Desktop projects, and C++ developers can consume WinUI...