Microsoft's WinUI Wed with Uno Platform for Cross-Platform Apps -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft's WinUI Wed with Uno Platform for Cross-Platform Apps

By David Ramel
03/12/2021

Microsoft and Uno Platform have teamed up to highlight the cross-platform app development capabilities of their respective dev tooling offerings.

For Uno Platform, that means Uno Platform. For Microsoft, that means WinUI, recently prepped for a milestone v.3 release.

WinUI uses Fluent Design to provide a native user experience (UX) framework for both Windows Desktop (Win32) and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** WinUI 3 *(source: Microsoft).*

"It provides a way to gradually migrate existing apps written in familiar technologies like MFC, WinForms, and WPF, allowing you to move these applications forward at your own pace," the WinUI site states. "It also supports familiar languages spanning C++, C#, Visual Basic, and even Javascript via React Native for Windows."

Uno Platform, meanwhile, has been around for a while, making some industry-leading breakthroughs important to the .NET developer space. Uno Platform says its open source and professionally supported flagship offering helps developers build native mobile, desktop and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML with just a single codebase.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Uno Platform Features *(source: Uno Platform).*

The company/platform just last month announced that its new v3.5 release instantly supported WinUI 3 Preview 4 as part of its #WinUIEverywhere campaign.

**[Click on image for larger, animated GIF view.]** The Cross-Platform App in Animated Action *(source: Microsoft).*

So Uno Platform is all in on WinUI and has been cooperating with Microsoft, resulting in this week's post about teaming up to build cross-platform apps.

"With Uno Platform you can bring your WinUI apps everywhere that WinUI does not natively run -- Web/WebAssembly, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android," the post reads.

It presents a five-minute tutorial on setting up a Visual Studio environment for WinUI and Uno Platform development, along with building a simple same-codebase app that uses WinUI InfoBar control and runs on Windows 10, WebAssembly and Android.

In a March 12 tweet, Uno Platform said the Microsoft-hosted post was "A teaser for @WindowsUI community call next week: a step-by-step tutorial at Windows Developer blogs showing WinUI InfoBar running on Web/WebAssembly and Android."

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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