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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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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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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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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BASTA! Spring 2014 – slides and demos

At this year’s spring edition of the BASTA! Conference (http://basta.net/2014se/) I gave three talks:
  • Windows 8.1 – UI Neuerungen
  • All you need to know about XAML
  • Asynchronous Programming with C#
Thanks to all the people who joined my sessions. I hope you liked them. If you’ve any feedback to share with me, feel free to contact me via this link. You can download all slides and demos here: Thomas talks
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