February 2017 – Thomas Claudius Huber

Lessons learned from Building a Visual Studio Shell with UWP

Note: There's a MS Dev Show Episode where @ytechie, @carlschweitzer and I are talking about UWP and the Visual Studio Shell built as part of this post. You find it here on www.msdevshow.com

UWP is the technology to build native applications for the Windows Platform. But there's still some stuff missing that is required by a typical line-of-business application for the classic desktop: TreeView, DataGrid, Validation, SqlClient and more. Some parts like a DataGrid are available as 3rd-party controls. Other parts like the TreeView are already in development, as you can see in the Windows Dev Platform Backlog. That backlog shows that Microsoft is working on a TreeView, which is awesome! And I'm pretty sure, at some point in the future we'll also get a DataGrid. This was the case for WPF and also for Silverlight. But let's see, the future will tell us and for today we've great 3rd-party DataGrids. But what else is required to build a classic desktop application? (more…)

How to Test Code that Uses Singletons like Application.Current.Dispatcher?

Got a question this morning from a student of my course WPF and MVVM: Test Driven Development.

Hey Thomas, how to test code that is using Application.Current.Dispatcher? Application.Current is null when the test is executed, which leads to an exception.

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