I'm in the process of learning the new Windows SDK Preview. This SDK has made it possible to set the Kind property of a StandardUICommand. The StandardUICommand was added in the 1809 SDK (17763) but the StandardUICommandKind property was readonly which made it impossible to use from XAML. You could only set the Kind using a constructor parameter in code. Now you can define the StandardUICommand in XAML inside your AppBarButton, MenuFlyoutItem and MenuBarItem.
I'm in the process of learning the new Windows SDK Preview. Today's subject is the new IsEditable and Text properties of the ComboBox control.
I'm in the process of learning the new Windows SDK Preview. Today's subject is the new Description property which is added to the TextBox, PasswordBox, RichEditBox, AutoSuggestBox and ComboBox input controls.
I'm in the process of learning the new Windows SDK Preview. Today's subject is the new MenuBar control. You can now create menus with submenus in your UWP apps. Before you could use the Menu control from the Windows Community Toolkit.
I'm in the process of learning the new Windows SDK Preview. Yesterday I wrote a blog about the new AppBarElementContainer. Today's subject is the new CornerRadius property of the Control class. Until now most input controls where rectangular. Now they can have rounded corners.
I have been playing with the new Windows Insider Preview SDK build 17733. It contains a new control named AppBarElementContainer. This control allows you to add other controls then the AppBarButton, AppBarSeparator and AppBarToggleButton to a CommandBar or the "depricated" AppBar.
On Monday, the Windows Developer team announced the preview release of the Windows UI Library (WinUI). The WinUI NuGet packages contain new and popular UWP XAML controls and features which are backward-compatible on a range of Windows 10 versions, from the latest insider flights down to the Anniversary Update (1607). Windows developers will no longer need to wait for their users to adopt the latest Windows 10 release in order to provide some of the rich features provided by these packages.
Read the get started article or use this quick step-by-step guide.
Microsoft also published a Sample app on GitHub named XamlUiBasics. The dev branch already contains demos of the new SplitButton, ToggleSplitButton. DropDownButton and the Repeater control. There is not much WinUI documentation available yet so we have to figure out how it works using the sample code.
I have used Visual States in XAML a lot. It all started in Silverlight, now I use it in my UWP apps. I often generate them in Blend for Visual Studio using recording. Blend used to generate Storyboards but with the current version generates Setters (UWP only). This is better, makes them easier to write and read. It is a bit buggy but I expect (hope) it will be fixed soon. A lot of developers are mistakenly not using Blend. They only use Visual Studio which doesn't support the great States feature of Blend. Writing the Visual States yourself can then be a lot of work.
To help those developers I have created an app called Xaml Diff. It generates the Visual State Setters using a diff analysis of your named elements in your XAML. It is free and you can download it from the Microsoft Store.
In a LOB application it is very common to have headers above an input controls (TextBox, ComboBox, Pickers, etc.) which also indicates that the data is required. This can easily be implemented in a XAML/UWP application using the HeaderTemplate property of the input controls.
Recently I used Conditional XAML for the first time in one of my UWP apps. I wanted to use a ColorPicker control which is only available in the Fall Creators Update (version 1709, build 16299). The Microsoft documentation explains what Conditional XAML is really well.
Conditional XAML provides a way to use the ApiInformation.IsApiContractPresent method in XAML markup. This lets you set properties and instantiate objects in markup based on the presence of an API without needing to use code behind. It selectively parses elements or attributes to determine whether they will be available at runtime. Conditional statements are evaluated at runtime, and elements qualified with a conditional XAML tag are parsed if they evaluate to true; otherwise, they are ignored.
Conditional XAML is available starting with the Creators Update (version 1703, build 15063). To use conditional XAML, the Minimum Version of your Visual Studio project must be set to build 15063 (Creators Update) or later, and the Target Version be set to a later version than the Minimum. See Version adaptive apps for more info about configuring your Visual Studio project.
While testing my app I noticed that it can be a little tricky when you combine it with {x:Bind}. Let me explain this using a simple demo.