03May

Use Windows AI in Your WPF Application

With the rise of Copilot+ PCs that have a neural processing unit (NPU), you as a developer get new possibilities to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in your Windows desktop applications. Instead of consuming a cloud-based AI model, you can use local AI models.

In this blog post, you will learn how to build a WPF application that uses a local small language model (SLM) called Phi Silica that comes pre-installed with Windows 11. Everything that you do with Phi Silica stays on your machine. Let's start by looking at Copilot+ PCs.

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21Feb

WPF in .NET 9.0 – Windows 11 Theming

The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a Desktop UI Framework that is part of .NET. Microsoft uses it to build Visual Studio. WPF got some nice new features with .NET 9:

  • Windows 11 Theming
  • The Accent Color
  • Hyphen-based ligatures

In a little series of blog posts, let's take a look at these features. Let's start in this blog post with Windows 11 Theming.

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05Feb

What is Actually the Universal Windows Platform and what is WinUI, MSIX, and Project Reunion / Windows App SDK?

This morning I got a wonderful message from a very smart and great person who watched my latest Pluralsight course, Fundamentals of Building .NET Desktop Applications. The course explains the .NET UI frameworks Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, WinUI (including Uno platform), and .NET MAUI in an overview and shows how to build your first .NET Desktop Apps for Windows with WinUI, WPF, and Windows Forms. The structure of the course is like this:

  • Knowing the UI frameworks for .NET Desktop Apps
  • Creating Your First WinUI App
  • Building Your First WPF App
  • Writing Your First Windows Forms App
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10Mar

Building a Classic Tabbed and Databound Desktop Application with UWP and MVVM

What kind of business applications do you build? Do they have a tabbed user interface? Most of mine do so. After spiking (=prototyping) the Visual Studio Shell I wanted to go deeper into building a tabbed user interface with UWP, of course databound with MVVM. As you might know, UWP does not contain a TabControl. But it contains a Pivot-Control that has pretty much of the functionality needed for a classic tabbed UI. So, let's go with the Pivot and let's see how far we can get. (more…)
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16Jul

UWP: The Master-Detail-Problem with the events SelectionChanged & LostFocus and How to Fix it

While creating apps with the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) I noticed a weird behavior, but I’m not sure if it’s a bug. Let’s just call it the “Master-Detail-Problem”. To explain it, I stripped  down my code to the XAML-snippet below. No code-behind needed. (more…)
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19Aug

How the Surface RT became the most reliable Server in our house (Co-starring: Azure and Windows Phone)

I loved my Surface RT from the beginning. The reason why I preferred the Surface RT over the Surface Pro was that the Surface Pro was too small for me as a Notebook, and too heavy as a tablet. So I was always the Notebook+tablet-guy, and not the one-device-for-all-guy. But you know, this might change with the Surface 3. Ok, now to this story. When I bought the Surface 2 (RT) in 2013, (more…)
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