You're reading from Learn WinUI 3.0 Leverage the power of WinUI, the future of native Windows application development

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781800208667

Length 440 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

WinUI

Concepts

Application Development

Author (1):

Alvin Ashcraft

View More author details

Table of Contents (20) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Introduction to WinUI and Windows Applications

2. Chapter 1: Introduction to WinUI FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Configuring the Development Environment and Creating the Project

4. Chapter 3: MVVM for Maintainability and Testability

5. Chapter 4: Advanced MVVM Concepts

6. Chapter 5: Exploring WinUI Controls

7. Chapter 6: Leveraging Data and Services

8. Section 2: Extending WinUI and Modernizing Applications

9. Chapter 7: Fluent Design System for Windows Applications

10. Chapter 8: Building WinUI Apps with .NET 5

11. Chapter 9: Enhancing Applications with the Windows Community Toolkit

12. Chapter 10: Modernizing Existing Win32 Applications with XAML Islands

13. Section 3: Build and Deploy on Windows and Beyond

14. Chapter 11: Debugging WinUI Applications with Visual Studio

15. Chapter 12: Hosting an ASP.NET Core Blazor Application in WinUI

16. Chapter 13: Building, Releasing, and Monitoring Applications with Visual Studio App Center

17. Chapter 14: Packaging and Deploying WinUI Applications

18. Assessments

19. Other Books You May Enjoy

Chapter 1: Introduction to WinUI

WinUI is a set of open source controls and libraries that Windows developers can leverage in their Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Win32 applications. UWP developers use the Windows software development kit (SDK) to build their applications and are required to select a target SDK version in a project's properties. By extracting the UWP controls and user interface (UI) components from the Windows SDK and releasing them as a set of open source libraries under the name WinUI, Microsoft is able to release versions at a faster cadence than Windows itself (as Windows SDK versions are linked to those of Windows). This separation also enables the controls to be used on older versions of Windows 10. While building UWP and Win32 applications with WinUI is the current recommendation, it is important to learn where WinUI and UWP fit in the larger Windows development landscape.

In this book, you will learn how to build applications for Windows with the WinUI 3.0 libraries. Throughout the course of the book, we will build a real-world application using recommended patterns and practices for Windows application development.

Before we start building our WinUI app, it's important to have a good foundation in Windows client development, the different types of Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) UI markup, and how WinUI compares to other Windows desktop development frameworks. Therefore, in this first chapter, you will start by learning some background on UWP and WinUI.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:

What UWP is and why Microsoft created yet another application framework
How XAML can be leveraged to create great UIs on many device sizes and families
Why WinUI was created and how it relates to UWP
Where WinUI fits in the Windows developer landscape
What WinUI 3.0 brings to the table

Don't worry! It won't take very long to cover the background stuff, and it will help provide some context as you start building your WinUI app. In the next chapter, you will get your hands on some code when you create your first WinUI project.