UnoConf

A Deep Dive Into Uno Extensions

Our Uno Platform 4.0 release brought with it a lot of updates and fixes to the platform but most importantly it also allowed us to unveil a series of productivity tooling and extensions that drastically help bring your app to market faster. One of those tools introduced was Uno Extensions, simply put, it allows you get started without having to write code from scratch, getting you to a fully functional project in minutes and saving you months of development time. Microsoft has extracted a host of capabilities outside of ASP.NET and made them available through Microsoft Extensions – covering hosting, logging, configuration, etc. In turn, Uno Platform Extensions are based on those Microsoft Extensions. To get a better understanding of Uno Extensions and how you can utilize them in your workflow, MVP and Uno Contributor Nick Randolph gave us a glimpse of Uno Extensions in action during his UnoConf 2021 session. Listen as he walks you through creating a host and registering services to more complex extensions like using the navigation extensions to navigate between pages views and the application. This session previews only a few of the available extensions but there are additional Uno extensions that we haven’t covered

Uno Platform Learning Resources for Beginners

For the most up-to-date information on Uno Platform learning resources, please visit Uno Platform Learning Resources – 2023 Update For those unfamiliar with Uno Platform, it allows C# and XAML developers to build single-codebase applications for Windows, WebAssembly, iOS, macOS, Android and Linux. To help new Uno Platform users get started, and those simply looking to improve their workflow, we gathered together a list of free and paid learning materials that in addition to our getting started tutorials (Tutorial 1, Tutorial 2) will have you creating multi platform applications in no time. FREE LEARNING MATERIALS: 1. Syncfusion Syncfusion who supports Uno Platform to two of its most popular UWP controls —DataGrid and Charts, published Uno Platform Succinctly. A free eBook that will take you from setting up your first Uno project in Visual Studio to a fully functioning single-page application. 2. Andrew Hoefling – Getting Started with Uno Platform Microsoft MVP Andrew Hoefling put together Uno Platform: Getting Started Series, a compilation of 8 great blogs covering the basics you need to get started with Uno Platform. • Uno Platform Getting Started with New Projects • Uno Platform View Stack Navigation • Uno Platform Tabbed Pages with the Command Bar •

Deploying Uno Platform Applications to Azure

On the Web, Uno Platform WebAssembly applications are all client-side, Static Web Apps. In this session from UnoConf 2021, Andres explores how to set up a hosting service designed for Static Web Apps and Uno Platform. As such it can be hosted in Azure with all the best Azure has to offer. Azure style Web Apps is a service that allows hosting static content on Azure by connecting a core repository like GitHub or Azure DevOps and automatically builds and deploys your applications based on code changes. In Azure, there are lot of features to make deploying and configuring your app seamless, including free SSL certificates that renew automatically, custom domains, a seamless security model, and free built-in authentication and routing. A secondary benefit of the Static Web Apps is the fact that your static content is globally distributed making it very close to your final user so that when they access your application, the application loads fast. Watch Andres Pineda’s full UnoConf talk for a more in depth look at deploying Uno Applications to Azure.   RESOURCES Additionally Gerard Gallant, an Uno Platform guest author and senior software developer has also written an article providing a Step-by-Step Walkthrough to

Best Practices for Testing Uno Platform Applications

Today Automated tests are no longer an afterthought, they’re an integral part of the development lifecycle. In this session, we share what you need to do to ensure your Uno Platform applications can be ready from the get-go for both automated unit and UI tests. As a very brief introduction, UI testing is made possible through something called Uno.UITests which is built specifically for Uno platform apps and the cornerstone of testing Uno platform applications. The first question that comes to our mind for automatic testing is why I should even bother to automate my Uno platform application tests? The truth is that tested applications not only ensure quality software is delivered to the customers, but it also reduces the time spent fixing obscure bugs. Additionally automatic tests help guarantee that your business logic produces the results you’re expecting and can enable you to catch difficult to reproduce issues and this is especially important to catch things that can break after new updates. There are a lot of different kinds of automatic testing but for Uno applications we want to focus on a particular kind of automatic testing called UI testing that focuses on the visual aspects of your app

Styling Beautiful Uno Platform Applications

Whether you’re looking to restyle a single control or an entire application, Uno Platform and WinUI’s styling engine gives you complete control down to the very last pixel while still giving you the native functionality on any platform. In this session from UnoConf 2021, Steve shares with you how you can start building beautiful Uno applications using the powerful styling capabilities from the platform as well as ready to ship themes that can transform your app with just a click of a button and a few lines of XAML. Our Styling Uno Platform Applications talk will first give you a look at the use of lookless control and how styling works on the Uno Platform. What tools are available to you to change the look of your app and what it means to be able to deliver pixel perfect applications while still maintaining the native richness of whichever platform you’re targeting. Finally, a deeper dive into the themes and styling in general will teach you firsthand how to customize these themes to match your own branding as well as give you the ability to build your own theme from scratch with some of the collections of styles, brushes, and resources

Using Native Controls in Uno Platform Applications – Demo Code Included

The truly successful frameworks are ones that empower developers by offering the flexibility of working with whichever libraries and tools are needed based on the platforms targeted. In Daniel ‘s UnoConf 2021 session, he shows us how we can use native APIs on our Uno Platform applications that gives us access to the tools needed to get the job done in case a suitable cross-platform control doesn’t exist. In mobile scenarios, if you ever have a need to incorporate a purely native view in Uno Platform cross-platform app, there is an option to do so. Uno Platform views inherit from the base native view defined in .NET binding or the native framework itself, so you can incorporate native views into your app’s visual tree. For Web / WebAssembly scenarios Uno Platform provides the tools to allow use of JavaScript libraries that are out in the open such as i.e. Flatpickr, something well documented in our docs. Watch as Daniel demonstrates the steps to create a barcode reader app that targets two different platforms, Android, and the Web. • Create an html5 video tag that will load the feed of the webcam on the web page • Import the QuaggaJS library

Migrating WPF Applications to Web

Migrating from desktop-based applications to the Web with Uno Platform is reasonably straight forward. The important thing is to first perform your research, think about how your current application was built and look at your existing architecture so you can come up with a roadmap for moving forward. When thinking about migrating a codebase, there are three things to think about: • Maximizing the reuse of the code. • Refresh where it makes sense so you can exploit new capabilities. • Rewrite as little as possible. In this session recording from UnoConf 2021, Daren walks through migration concerns, key aspects of reuse, the importance of research and then look at key aspects of XAML compatibility on migrating your application over to the Uno Platform. The Uno Platform’s application API is compatible with the UWP API as well as WinUI 3 and it’s important to understand the capabilities of each of those platforms.   The key takeaway here is to understand what is supported before you dive in and start building. We hope Darren’s session gives you some general guidelines for starting WPF migration with Uno Platform. Consider it an insight to some of the capabilities that are available using WebAssembly

UnoConf 2021 Summary and Recordings

Uno Platform’s vision since day one has been to bring WinUI everywhere, enabling developers to create pixel-perfect single code base, web, mobile and desktop applications using both C# and XAML. That’s why this year’s UnoConf proved to be an exciting one as we got to share the release of 4.0 and how much Uno Platform has matured – and why we called it a “platform” to begin with. We welcomed viewers from over 30 different countries this year, showing that Uno Platform is making waves globally. We were able to showcase contributions to the platform from Microsoft, demos from core team members and more. If you missed this year’s UnoConf, we’ve got you covered. In this UnoConf blog series, we’ll be breaking down each one of our speaker sessions and their demos in a deep dive. Make sure to tune in weekly, for now you can catch up on our tech talks firsthand from links below. • Uno Extensions • Styling Uno Platform Applications • Deploying Uno Platform Applications to Azure • Using Native Controls in Uno Platform Apps • Best Practices for Testing Uno Platform Applications • Migrating WPF Applications to Web • How Uno Platform ports features from

Announcing Uno Platform 4-0. Four Major Components Added

Four platform additions for speeding up application development announced: Visual Studio Code and Figma integration, Uno Platform Extensions and UI Toolkit.   Today, at UnoConf, we announced Uno Platform 4.0 which marks major new expansion to the platform, and an introduction of a set of new productivity tooling for Visual Studio Code users, a Toolkit of multiplatform-first components, a Figma plugin to eliminate the designer-developer handoff for XAML developers, and a set of Extensions to help with jumpstarting your apps.    Following today’s announcements, with Uno Platform you will be able to develop C# and XAML applications from any operating system or browser, and deploy them to Web, Android, iOS, macOS, Linux and Windows.  Note: If you missed any of UnoConf 2021, you can still experience every moment. Check out the conference here. Uno Platform Extensions To help you bootstrap a new Uno Platform application and get started with proper architecture we are introducing Uno Extensions. The idea is you shouldn’t need to ever write code from scratch for commonly used functions, while retaining an option to easily extend any feature.  Microsoft has extracted a host of capabilities outside of ASP.NET and made them available through Microsoft Extensions – covering hosting, logging, configuration, etc. In turn, Uno Platform Extensions are based on Microsoft Extensions. Reactive (MVU-X) While we have ~10 extensions available, Reactive is one of the bigger ones and deserves special attention. In our