2021 was quite the year. Not only for our team but also for the community of contributors that helped get Uno Platform where we are today. Thank you for making our favorite moments from this year possible, and for being part of this incredible community.
Releases
Its only natural to start this post by recapping the innovation that went into Uno Platform this year. We had 8 releases (3100+ commits!) across 12 months: or about 6 weeks apart. This seems to be the sweet spot for releasing as it is a good balance for new features being tested and available in our ‘dev’ releases and making them final in our official releases.
We stayed true to shipping on, or very close to, Day 0 to WinUI and .NET Releases – both official releases as well as previews. While this process puts extra strain on our team, it is a necessary step which makes sure that our community can take advantage of newest features published by both Windows and .NET teams. We hope to keep this up in 2022.
Highlights wise – in addition to core support for WinUI 3 and .NET 6 we also added support for Visual Studio 2022, VS Code, added a Figma Plugin and launched a set of cross-platform control set called Uno Toolkit. We brought over some bigger controls from WinUI world like Calendar / Date pickers as well as added “Sun Valley” fluent sides. And of course, all along the way we improved performance of Uno Platform, especially on WebAssembly side, which saw performance improvements of 50%+. We are especially proud of the continued Linux support we provide so your applications built with Uno Platform can truly run everywhere.
The results have been amazing, with Uno Platform getting over 1.3m downloads to date. As a recognition we now have over 6000 GitHub Stars and over 200 contributors.
Contributing to Other Open-Source Projects
This section deserves a blog on its own, so we will be brief. Yes, our biggest contribution to open-source community is Uno Platform itself, but we also contribute to other related open-source projects. To name a few, in 2022 we made bigger contributions to Prism and Skia Sharp projects. Also, our contribution to NuGet Package Explorer enabled it to run on Web via our WebAssembly support, bringing this tool to all non-Windows developers who wanted to use it.
Lasty, we contributed more than just code, but we also sponsored the .NET Foundation which helps numerus other open-source projects around the world.
User Group community
Given travel restrictions we resorted to virtual meetings. While this isn’t our preferred way of engaging with developer community, it also allowed us to reach out to some groups which we likely wouldn’t be able to travel to. Over the course of 2021 we spoke at over 30 user groups at all continents which was very exciting for our team.
If you are part of a user group and would like us to present to your group, please let us know.
Learning Resources
We were extremely happy to see new learning resources published by community and partners. In addition to already-existing Udemy course, there was a Pluralsight course on Uno Platform published. Also, two books – Creating Cross-Platform C# Applications with Uno Platform by Matt Lacey and Uno Platform Succintly – were published in 2021.
UnoConf 2021
UnoConf 2021 came in December, and it is a natural way to wrap up this blog post with it. At UnoConf we announced version 4.0 with significant improvements and highlighted some bigger clients using Uno Platform in production, such as – Kahua and TradeZero.
You can watch the recording of keynote and all sessions at links below:
1. Keynote
2. Migrating WPF Applications to Web with Daren May
3. Using Native Controls in Uno Platform Apps with Daniel Causer
4. Uno Extension’s with Nick Randolph
5. How Uno Platform ports features from WinUI on Day 0 with Martin Zickmund
6. Deploying Uno Platform Applications to Azure with Andres Pineda
7. Best Practices for Testing Uno Platform Applications with Lester Botello
8. Styling Uno Platform Applications with Steve Bilogan
We wish you a happy holiday and we hope you give Uno Platform a try and stay close to our open-source project in the future.
