Leverage Existing Tools

📖 Overview

One of the philosophical tenants of the Uno Platform is that, wherever possible, the platform should leverage existing tools as Microsoft's tooling is a treat to work with. With the Uno Platform, you can, and should, build your app with those tools as part of your inner-development loop with the Universal Windows Platform and then as part of your outer-development loop validated by deploying your application to iOS, Android, and the web via WebAssembly. 

In this module, you'll be (re)introduced to three key tools and learn the most productive way to develop an application:

• Edit and Continue.
• Live Visual Tree.
• XAML Hot Reload.

🎯 Start the application

1. Right-click on the Todo.UWP application and select Set as Startup Project.
2. Right-click on the Todo.UWP application and select Deploy.
3. Ensure the platform selector is set to Todo.UWP.
4. Navigate to Debug -> Start Debugging to launch the application.

🎯 Play with Live Visual Tree

❗️ Live Visual Tree provides you with a real-time view of your running XAML code via the Live Visual Tree and the Live Property Explorer. These two tools give you a tree view of the UI elements of your running XAML application and show you the runtime properties of any UI element you select.

🎯 Play with Windows Hot Reload

❗️XAML Hot Reload helps you build your UWP app user interface by letting you make changes to XAML code while your app is running. Hot Reload is available in both Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio. This feature enables you to incrementally build and test XAML code with the benefit of the running app's data context, authentication state, and other real-world complexity that is hard to simulate during design-time.

🎯 Play with Uno Hot Reload

📚 Additional Reading Material

• The Uno Platform Website.
• The Philosophy of Uno.
• How to: Use Edit and Continue (C#).
• Write and debug running XAML code with XAML Hot Reload.
• Inspect XAML properties while debugging.
• TodoMVC.

⏭️ What's next

In the next module you'll learn about the next philosophical tenant — Let views, do views and use the tools you just learned about to build the business logic of the infamous TodoMVC code kata for the Universal Windows Platform, iOS, Android and WebAssembly from a single codebase in C#.