I'm in the process of learning the new Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 18323. It includes a new control named TwoPaneView. The TwoPaneView is a Panel control which contains two Panes. The Panes are shown next to each other if there is enough room, otherwise below each other. If that is not possible only one pane is shown. You can use it in situations in which you normally used a RelativePanel in combination with some ViewStates to reposition one panel beside or below another depending off the size (AdaptiveTriggers). This was always a lot of work which is now very easy with the new control.
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.