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Share on twitter Share on linkedin Share on reddit At the end of May, I had the tremendous opportunity to attend Microsoft Build 2023, the premiere developer conference from Microsoft. This year it finally returned to a fully hybrid form, and I was lucky enough to be there in person in Seattle. While most of the sessions were aired live so everyone could watch them online, some remained in-person only – and I would love to share a few with you today! Microsoft Build Q&A sessions The most valuable sessions I have attended this year at Build were the Q & A sessions, which were unfortunately in-person only. These were held in small rooms for about 30 attendees each, with the team members behind a featured product answering questions from the audience. I attended four of these in total. Microsoft Store Q&A In the Microsoft Store Q&A session, the developers explained how they strive to make the Store app the best showcase of Windows app development by adding beautiful (but at the same time meaningful) animations and transitions throughout the product and trying to include a wide range of available APIs. It was surprising to hear that the Store itself does

Share on twitter Share on linkedin Share on reddit In today’s world, it is essential for any application to be accessible across multiple platforms to reach a wider audience. However, building a multi-platform application leads to some unique design and navigation considerations. In this blog post, we will discuss the key factors developers should keep in mind while building a multi-platform application. Understanding Design and Navigation for Multi-Platform Applications Before we get into the specific design and navigation considerations, it’s helpful to step back and look at the high-level challenge of building applications that work on any screen size or orientation, in other words, a multi-platform application. The term form factor often refers to the device’s physical characteristics where the application will run. These characteristics might include its size and orientation, whether it’s a phone, tablet or desktop, and whether it’s equipped with a touch screen. While some applications will be built with a single device form factor in mind (for example, a standard tablet that an organization rolls out for a specific line of business application), most applications will have to adapt to the device the application is being run on. As you can imagine, it’s almost impossible to

Share on twitter Share on linkedin Share on reddit We’re excited to announce our second release for 2023, which includes over 200 fixes and product improvements, as well as support for .NET 8 Preview 2. As promised, we’ve been hard at work on the improvements you requested in our 2023 Roadmap survey. One of the top requests was to make the startup experience with Uno Platform as seamless as possible. In response, we’ve introduced a new startup experience designed to make setting up new projects with Uno Platform easier and more flexible than ever before. The App Template Wizard will guide you through setting up your project, allowing you to choose as many or as few pieces of Uno Platform as you desire. So, starting a new Uno Platform project is easier than ever moving forward! As with every release, we significantly improved performance across all supported platforms. In addition to multiple in-memory and runtime performance improvements, we are introducing OpenGL acceleration for Uno Islands, which are typically used in WPF modernization scenarios, showing 12x improvement over software rendering. In addition, TextBlock rendering was improved for all Skia backends, showing 5x improvements in common scenarios. Let’s take a deeper look

Share on twitter Share on linkedin Share on reddit One of the most significant aspects of the XAML-based applications is the concept of lookless controls. This means that controls can be restyled without changing the behaviour. The Windows App SDK and Uno Platform provide out-of-the-box styles for GridView and ListView controls, offering a great starting point for working with these controls. In this post, Nick Randolph digs into  being able to disable individual items. The default style for these controls includes a Disabled state, which is applied to each item when the IsEnabled property on the control is set to true. However, in some scenarios, it may be necessary to disable individual items. Unfortunately, unlike many other aspects of the GridView and ListView controls, there’s no easy way to disable individual items. Let’s dig into this and look at why it’s difficult and a workaround that can be used. For the rest of this post, we will focus on the GridView, but everything we cover can be applied equally to the ListView control. Disabling Items via IsEnabled on GridViewItem The GridView control has several templates that control how the control is styled. A ControlTemplate for the GridView defines things like