My plan...

A few years back I saw the Microsoft Fluent video and it captured my imagination. The follow through on this by Microsoft seems to have been rather lacklustre so far but I still regard this as a way forward for the interface design. 




In early 2020 I was starting work on a new Windows project and I decided to use the new design model with the Win UI framework and a NavigationView control (as seen in the Settings programs within Windows 10). This was quite a hill to climb for me because I had been using Visual Basic.net and Windows Forms (and Web Forms) for many years, but I finally got my head into a space where I would devote my time to getting into C# and WPF. So I dived in and tried to learn it all at one.

Wow, was this a challenge. The problem mainly is that this general space is so polluted with different versions of the technology but with the same control names, sop often when I tried to get something working it was because it was using sample code for a different model (e.g. Xaml Islands vs WinUI v2). I did find my way through each problem as time went on, but it made it slower than it should have been.

Originally I tried to use XAML Islands to use the Win UI controls, but despite my lack of knowledge in this area the amount of difficulties I was experiencing seemed to be too much - it felt wrong! Then I decided to write the first draft of my application using Win UI v2.4 for UWP. This was a better experience, but the fact that it is sandboxed gave me real issues, such as the fact that my software program also needs to access a USB device (I didn't know that at the start) - so I also had to write a separate Win32 program to handle this and then 

Predictably, it was difficult. I work on my own so I do not have the luxury (?) of a room full of other developers to ask. If I have a bug or don't know how to do something then I have to figure it out myself.

I know from a previous blog that I wrote (over ten years ago, and gone now) that posting useful snippets up was often very gratefully received by other developers. Using the Blogger site means that my posts get into the search engines quickly, and many people were finding my posts based on searches for the same issues that I was having.

So this blog is intended to be a place where I write up all my "Eureka" moments. I am currently writing my program with Project Reunion 0.5, so I will add my own "how-to" comments here.

Location: United Kingdom

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Setting a colour from a StaticResource in C#

If you want to use a {StaticResource} colour for Foreground text then there are examples aplenty on how to do this in XAML. However it did take me a while to find out how to do this if I wanted to set it in code i.e. C# So within a TextBlock construct within XAML you might say for a TextBlock called Label_CurrentClient: Foreground="{StaticResource SystemChromeMediumLowColor}" In C# you would say: Label_CurrentClient.Foreground = new SolidColorBrush((Windows.UI.Color)Application.Current.Resources["SystemChromeMediumLowColor"]);
Read more

ParallaxView suddenly no longer supports direct content

The current release of the XAML Controls Gallery app is compiled against Preview 4 of Project Reunion. Against that specific version the ParallaxView control works fine. The example source code for this control is: <ParallaxView Source="{Binding ElementName=listView}" VerticalShift="500">     <Image Source="ms-appx:///Assets/SampleMedia/cliff.jpg" /> </ParallaxView> However, looking at this against the release version of Reunion 0.5 it suddenly throws a warning up in the XAML viewer: The type 'ParallaxView' does not support direct content. and the line  <Image Source="ms-appx:///Assets/SampleMedia/cliff.jpg" /> has a wavy line under it. I couldn't find any readily available examples that say what to do about this, but the answer is to provide this C# code. Image splash = new Image(); splash.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri("ms-appx:///Assets/ SampleMedia/cliff .jpg")); splash.Stretch = Stretch.Unifor...
Read more

Resource Strings - UWP vs net 5

If you store your display text in a Resources file then most of the documentation that tells you how to retrieve it will be: var resourceLoader = Windows.ApplicationModel.Resources.ResourceLoader.GetForCurrentView(); If you try to use this code in a net 5 WinUI app then it will compile OK, but there will be a runtime error complaining about the use of GetForCurrentView, of the nature of: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException : 'Resource Contexts may not be created on threads that do not have a CoreWindow. (0x80073B27)' After a bit of digging around I found the equivalent call you need is var resourceLoader = Windows.ApplicationModel.Resources.ResourceLoader.GetForViewIndependentUse();
Read more