What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to WinUI, examines the history of UI frameworks in Windows and the origins of WinUI, and you will create your first WinUI 3 project in Visual Studio.
Chapter 2, Configuring the Development Environment and Creating the Project, explains how to install and configure Visual Studio for WinUI development, the basics of XAML and C#, and kicks off the hands-on with a project that will be enhanced throughout the book.
Chapter 3, MVVM for Maintainability and Testability, introduces the basics of Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, one of the most important design patterns when building XAML-based applications.
Chapter 4, Advanced MVVM Concepts, builds on the basics you learned about the MVVM pattern in WinUI apps to handle more advanced techniques. You’ll learn how to keep components loosely coupled and testable when adding new dependencies to your projects.
Chapter 5, Exploring WinUI Controls, explores some of the many controls and APIs that WinUI offers for developers building Windows applications. This chapter explores the brand-new controls and updated controls that were previously available in WinUI 2 and UWP.
Chapter 6, Leveraging Data and Services, looks at managing data, a core part of software development. This chapter covers some key concepts of data management, including state management and the service locator pattern.
Chapter 7, Fluent Design System for Windows Applications, explains the tenets of Microsoft’s Fluent Design System and how to implement them in your WinUI applications.
Chapter 8, Adding Windows Notifications to WinUI Applications, covers how to leverage the Windows App SDK to support push notifications and app notifications in your WinUI applications.
Chapter 9, Enhancing Applications with the Windows Community Toolkits, introduces the Windows Community Toolkit and the .NET Community Toolkit – collections of open source libraries for Windows developers. You will learn how to leverage the controls and helpers from the toolkits in your WinUI projects.
Chapter 10, Accelerating App Development with Template Studio, shows how to leverage Template Studio to create a new WinUI project, which can be a daunting task, built on the best Windows development patterns and practices.
Chapter 11, Debugging WinUI Applications with Visual Studio, shows how to leverage the XAML debugging tools in Visual Studio to track down pesky bugs in your WinUI project – good debugging skills are essential for developers.
Chapter 12, Hosting a Blazor Application in WinUI, looks at the WebView2 control in WinUI and using it to host a Blazor application deployed to the cloud from inside your Windows application.
Chapter 13, Take Your App Cross-Platform with Uno Platform, explains how to migrate a WinUI project to Uno Platform, which allows developers to write XAML and C# code in a single code base and run it on any platform.
Chapter 14, Packaging and Deploying WinUI Applications, explores some of the multiple options WinUI developers have for packaging and deploying WinUI applications, looking at deploying through the Microsoft Store, WinGet, and side-loading apps.