Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
There s been quite a bit of hype around the use of AI for vibe coding applications. Add in the use of a Ralph loop and we re getting close to being able to automatically generate entire applications. But how much of this is hype and how much is reality. In this post I ll walk through using ... Read more The post Ralph built a Cross-Platform app using Uno Platform whilst I slept. appeared first on…
For most of my career, I’ve been a proud Windows developer. I build Windows apps. I run Windows as my primary dev machine. It’s been home. But recently? That’s been challenged — not by another OS, but by AI. Developer workflow is changing fast. Agents, containers, automation — they’re reshaping how we build software. So ... Read more The post I used to be a Windows Developer .. and I still am…
The world of software development has been inverted by the introduction of AI. This started off as an assistive role but quite rapidly AI is taking on more and more autonomy. In fact, the recent hype around Ralph (Ralph Wiggum as a software engineer ) is evidence enough that whole sections of work can now be ... Read more The post Use AI to Build Cross Platform Applications with Uno Platform, VS…
With every update to the various models and tools, AI becomes more capable and in a lot of ways more independent. In much the same way as a junior developer learns over time and can take on more complex tasks, and can carry the tasks out with less supervision, we ve seen AI mature to the ... Read more The post Development Process with AI appeared first on Nick s .NET Travels .
Earlier this year Microsoft was touting all the work they re putting into Windows in order to make it AI ready. This includes a slew of features that will show up only on their copilot enabled computers. However, there are some features that will be more widely available. One of these is the support added to ... Read more The post Getting Started with MCP on Windows appeared first on Nick s .NET…
One of the things about software development is that it is still inherently expensive to do; well at least, to do it well. There have been countless attempts to reduce the cost of software development leading to innovation in terms of both tooling and processes. In this post I m going to discuss the more recent ... Read more The post Is Vibe Coding Just a Cost Cutting Strategy, like…
In my previous post on Click to Do we created an application that is activated via a URI triggered by Click to Do. In this post we ll register with Click to Do by implementing the IActionProvider interface and registering as COM Server. As with the previous post on Click to Do, this only works with ... Read more The post Windows AI Click to Do with an Uno Platform Application as an IActionProvider…
This was going to be a post about using COM Server activation in a WinAppSdk application to interact with Click to Do. However, since there s currently a major regression in the dev channel of the Windows insider builds (reported here, here and here), which prevents Visual Studio from debugging any applications, that ll have to wait. ... Read more The post Installing Older Versions of Visual…
I ve talked a lot in the past about how XAML applications lend themselves to being styled using data and control templates. The Uno Platform, which defaults to the Fluent theme, also supports Material, which adjusts the control templates for the in-box controls according to the Material theme from Google. In this post we re going to ... Read more The post CherylUI theme for your Uno Platform…
With the latest generation of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft is integrating AI deep into the core of Windows with features like Recall and Click to Do. In this post we ll look at Click to Do and how you can use it to launch an Uno Platform application. Before we jump into our Uno Platform application, let s ... Read more The post Windows AI Click to Do with an Uno Platform Application appeared first on…
I decided to ask ChatGPT what suggestions it had for building cross platform applications. Here s it s response, along with some commentary, specifically around the offering by the Uno Platform. What's the best guidance for building cross platform applications? From ChatGPT: The best guidance for building cross-platform applications can be broken into strategic decisions, tooling choices, ... Read…
As I discussed in my previous post the Uno Platform team have release a subscription based offering, Uno Platform Studio, which includes a runtime visual designer, Hot Design. In this post we re going to use a new application to launch Hot Design and take a look around. The first thing to be aware of after ... Read more The post Launching and Exploring Hot Design for Uno Platform appeared first on…
As the .NET ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, so does the need for robust tooling that helps developers build cross-platform applications faster and more efficiently. If you’ve been exploring the Uno Platform ecosystem, you may have come across two offerings: the free, open-source Uno Platform and the paid Uno Platform Studio. While they’re closely ... Read more The post 🆓 Uno Platform vs…
Quite often I hear the complaint that WinUI, and thus Uno Platform, doesn t include validation. There was some evidence a while ago that it was being worked on by the WinUI team (ie commented out validation XAML in the WinUI styles), but there doesn t seem to be any more progress in this area, despite a ... Read more The post How to do Validation in Windows and Uno Platform Applications the Easy…
The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern has long been a cornerstone in building maintainable and testable UIs across frameworks like WPF, Xamarin, Uno Platform, and others. It provides a clean separation of concerns and enables powerful data binding. But despite its popularity and maturity, MVVM often introduces unnecessary complexity and friction—particularly when it comes to state management ...…
In this post we re going to do two things. Firstly, we re going to step through how to create an Uno Platform application with VS Code. Then, we re going to use VS Code to generate an instructions file that will help guide Copilot Chat to generate output that s more consistent with your application structure. Setting up ... Read more The post Using Instruction Files with VS Code Agent Mode and the…
Last week v6.0 of the Uno Platform was released marking the cumulation of a number of years of investment in both the core cross platform framework, as well as the new Uno Platform Studio (including Hot Design), a set of tools that are designed to accelerate your development. In this post we re going to take ... Read more The post Uno Platform 6.0 for Windows and Cross-Platform Applications…
In the past three posts about working with AI on Windows, we covered connecting to Phi Silica, getting progress response, and building a chat experience. In this post we re going to improve the styling of the chat by using data templates and including a system message to setup the chat interaction. At the end of the previous ... Read more The post AI on Windows: Chat Styling appeared first on Nick…
In the past two posts we covered connecting to Phi Silica and then getting progress response to provide a more real time experience. The next step is to improve the layout of the application to display the prior message history. In this post we ll cover updating the UI to include a list of prior messages. ... Read more The post AI on Windows: Chat with Phi Silica appeared first on Nick s .NET…
In my previous post I covered the basics of creating an Uno Platform application that consumes Phi Silica in order to build a very basic prompt-response based user interface. When the application was run there was a very evident latency when the button was clicked before the response was presented. In this post we re going ... Read more The post AI on Windows: Progress Responses with Phi Silica…
Last year Microsoft introduced Phi Silica and recently made an experimental release of the Windows App Sdk that can be used by Windows application to interact with Phi Silica. In this post we ll connect an Uno Platform application to Phi Silica. We ll keep things simple and start with the Blank preset in the Uno Platform ... Read more The post AI on Windows: Chatting with Phi Silica appeared first…
Recently Microsoft has been promoting Copilot+ PCs as the next wave of tablets, laptops and PCs capable of handling your AI requirements. Other than having a Copilot button, what does this actually mean? In this post we ll take a look at what makes these PCs different, how you can detect that your application is running ... Read more The post AI on Windows: Detecting NPU appeared first on Nick s…
In my previous attempt with TempoLabs I was able to successfully build the ABN lookup scenario that I d been testing with other app builders. I was prompted to take another look and I was even more impressed this time around. In order to do a comparison with my experience from my last attempt I started ... Read more The post AI App Builders – Re-take – TempoLabs appeared first on Nick s .NET…
Ok, so the title is a bit of a mouthful but here s the scenario you want to quickly spin up an application but you don t want to mess around downloading and installing any of the usual development tools required to build an Uno Platform application. In this post we re going to walk through creating ... Read more The post Building Cross Platform Applications using Hot Design and Codespaces with Uno…
I was watching overview of TempoLabs and my initial impression was wow, that s a lot of stuff as they not only have AI generation but it seems they understand at least the basics of a software devlelopment process. When you invoke the AI generation, it firstly parrots back its understanding of what you ve asked for. ... Read more The post AI App Builders – Take 3 – TempoLabs appeared first on Nick…
Following from my previous attempt at building a simple app to retrieve the ABN for a business, I figured I d give lovable.dev a go. This will be a quick post to cover some of the likes/dislikes from this process. Firstly I have to hand it to Lovable, they ve done a great job with the user ... Read more The post AI App Builders Take 2 Lovable appeared first on Nick s .NET Travels .
I figured I d take some of these AI app builders for a run to see how capable they are. To date I ve mainly just been taking advantage of the AI capabilities that are progressively being added to VS Code and Visual Studio though tooling such as Copilot but I m hoping that these AI app builders, ... Read more The post AI App Builders Take 1 co.dev appeared first on Nick s .NET Travels .
The default template for a Windows application comes with almost no guidance for how developers should do even basic things like logging. Luckily, the Uno Platform wizard provides a simple way to create an application that configures the Microsoft.Extensions for each of the supported platforms. This includes the ability to setup Microsoft.Extensions.Logging with the ability ... Read more The post…
Following my previous posts that introduced the AI Dev Gallery, added AI code to an Uno Platform application and adjusting the AI code to work with Android, in this post we re going to look at the adjustments required to get the AI code to work on iOS. The issues with iOS aren t apparent until you ... Read more The post Taking AI Dev Gallery Code Cross Platform with Uno Platform iOS appeared first…
In the last two posts I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, and then demonstrated how code exported from the AI Dev Gallery can be added to an Uno Platform application. Unfortunately, whilst the code compiles on all the target platforms of the Uno Platform, the application fails to operate ... Read more The post Taking AI Dev Gallery Code Cross Platform with Uno…
In my previous post I introduced the AI Dev Gallery that Microsoft has been working on, as a way of creating a Windows application that can use AI. In my post I exported the code for object detection, which uses the Faster RCNN 10 model. In this post, we re going to take this code and ... Read more The post Adding AI to an Uno Platform Application using AI Dev Gallery appeared first on Nick s .NET…
Recently, Microsoft announced an open-sourced project that they ve been working on, AI Dev Gallery. Whilst it s not available on the Microsoft Store as an app you can download, it s easy enough to clone the repository and run the app. In this post we ll use the AI Dev Gallery to build a simple Windows application that ... Read more The post Using the AI Dev Gallery to Create a Windows Application…
The Figma Windows UI kit file has been updated by the WinUI team. If you re looking to design an app for Windows (or the Uno Platform), this is a great resource for working with Fluent design. Alternatively if you want to use Material, you can use the Uno Platform Material Toolkit. The post Windows UI Kit for Figma appeared first on Nick s .NET Travels .
Earlier this month Microsoft introduced the preview of Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Abstractions and Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries with the aim of making it easier for .NET developers to integrate AI services into their applications. The Uno Platform provides support for using Microsoft.Extensions in applications that target Windows and any other Uno Platform target (iOS, Android, MacCatalyst etc)…
XAML is often criticised for being verbose, hard to read and unnecessary as an additional language for defining the interface for an application. This feedback has lead to the creation of C# markup which works with both Windows UI / Windows App SDK and Uno Platform applications. However, I find that the declarative nature and ... Read more The post XAML Reuse with Templates in Applications for…
In my previous post I looked how the Windows UI 3 Figma file components and variants map to styles and visual states in Windows UI but glosses over some of the details of how resources and in particular, Styles, are defined in Windows UI. To cover this in more detail, in this post we re going to drill ... Read more The post Understanding Styles and Resources in Windows and Uno Platform…
In a previous post I covered using Figma to design and develop applications for Windows and the Uno Platform. This was a high level post that didn t get into either Figma files (Fluent and Material) in much detail. One thing that is common to both files is the use of components, and component variants, to ... Read more The post How Figma Component Variants map to XAML Visual States in Windows UI…
OAuth2 is quite a common authentication standard for web services to use. Whilst a lot of services have now updated to use OpenID Connect, there are still some, like the Figma api, that still use OAuth2. In this post we re going to walk through using the Uno.Extensions web authentication package to simplify not only the ... Read more The post Using Web Authentication (OAuth2) to access Figma from…
Designing applications for Windows and the Uno Platform can be difficult if you attempt to start from a clean slate and assume that you have to design everything from the ground up. This would require you to design even simple elements like a TextBox and a Button. After designing each element, a developer would then ... Read more The post Using Figma to Develop Windows and Uno Platform…
This post is going to walk through using the Microsoft tool, Kiota, to generate client code from a Swagger / OpenAPI definition that can be used within a Windows (WinUI/Windows App Sdk) / Uno Platform application. Ok, so let s backup a little firstly, Swagger / OpenAPI (see description) is used to describe service endpoints. ... Read more The post Add some Swagger to your Windows and Uno Platform…
In all but the simplest single page application, the layout of an application has to be dynamicaly changed in order to display information, or capture input from the user. Most application frameworks provide a variety of components to make this easy. For example in a WinUI / Windows App SDK application can use a Frame ... Read more The post What s a Navigation Region in Windows and Uno Platform…
Out of the box, applications built using WinUI / Windows App Sdk or the Uno Platform have access to a wide range of controls, such as Frame, TabBar and NavigationView that can be used for navigation. However, there s no common pattern/metaphor that makes it navigate within an application. Uno.Extensions includes Navigation which provides a consistent abstraction for ... Read more The post…
The Uno Platform supports many third party control libraries, such as Mapsui and LiveCharts, but sometimes there are components that you want to use that haven t been adapted to work with Uno. For this, you can turn to .NET MAUI Embedding which allows for any .NET MAUI control to be hosted within an Uno Platform ... Read more The post Using Syncfusion Controls in Uno Platform Application using…
This has been a work in progress over the last couple of releases in order to deliver a better developer experience for the Uno Platform. The 5.1 release introduced the Uno.Sdk which allowed for better integration with Visual Studio no more pesky reload project warnings appearing. With the 5.2 release the Uno Platform goes ... Read more The post Uno Platform 5.2 Released One Project To Rule Them…
In my previous post I walked through how to connect to ChatGPT in order to integrate AI into a multi-platform (Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform) based application. In this post we re going to add the ability to switch which AI model (GPT 3, 4 etc) is used when connecting to ChatGPT. We ll also cover ... Read more The post Switching AI Models with ChatGPT in a Windows and Uno Platform…
In today s digital world, integrating AI into your applications has become increasingly important. One powerful AI model that you can leverage is OpenAI s GPT, known for its natural language processing capabilities. In this blog post, we ll guide you through the process of connecting your Windows app to ChatGPT using the Microsoft Azure.AI.OpenAI library, allowing you ... Read more The post…
As with all software managing dependencies in often a lot harder than it seems, particularly when there are conflicting priorities. In this post I m going to talk about some of the challenges developers face relating to dependencies when building Windows and cross/multi platform applications using .NET, the Windows App SDK and the Uno Platform. I ll ... Read more The post Managing Dependencies in…
Ok this post took a bit of inspiration from the C# Markup support that s available for the Uno Platform where it s easy to build a template selector (for a ListView for example) using a set of Case statements. This got me thinking that there must be a way that we can use a similar technique ... Read more The post Conditional Template Selector for XAML Applications for Windows and Uno Platform…
In this post I m going to experiment using ChatGPT and Copilot to help generate the XAML for pages in a Windows application. Since we ll be using WinUI and the Windows App SDK, the application can be extended to support other platforms via the Uno Platform. ChatGPT We ll start by using ChatGPT (in this case ChatGPT v3.5) ... Read more The post Using ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to Generate the XAML…
Last week, the Uno Platform officially launched their Figma Plugin which works in parity with the Uno Platform Material Toolkit to support both designers and developers with the process of designing applications. If you haven t already, check out the announcement post that provides a high level overview of both the plugin and toolkit. In this post we ll ... Read more The post Designing and…