My UWP Link List

I’m still at the beginning of my journey into the world of Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. In this blog post (which will be updated over time) I’ll collect various links to resources I found interesting and/or helpful – maybe they are of use for other people, too.

Basics

• The Windows Dev Center (dev.windows.com) is the starting point for Windows development. Documentation, downloads, samples – it’s here.
• Get started with Windows apps contains everything to, well, get started. I doubt you’ll find a more clear and concise information about how to do it than this page and its sub-pages (in the past, people actually made it their job to extract information out of wordy Microsoft articles).
• Back in the Windows 8.x days, side-loading didn’t sound too attractive. Much has changed in Windows 10 and this article sums it up: Sideload LOB apps in Windows 10
• And things are looking to get even better soon: App Installer! (via Universal Windows App Deployment blog)
• I wanted a code-signing certificate (not only for my future UWP apps), in the end I chose KSoftware who are an official partner of Comodo.

Debugging

• How to trigger suspend, resume, and background events for Windows Store apps in Visual Studio

Resources

General

• Blog: Building Apps for Windows (by the Windows Apps Team)
• Article: The Lifecycle of a UWP App
• Article: The path from a desktop app to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app
• Article: Optimizing your XAML app for performance (10 by 10)
• Website: Develop UWP apps – How-to articles for UWP apps on Windows 10 (“Instructions and code examples for all kinds of tasks, such as using geolocation services, transferring data over a network, and porting apps to Windows 10”)

Architecture

• Template 10 is a set of Visual Studio project templates that take care of boilerplate stuff like navigation and suspension
• Visual Studio Extension: Template 10 Template Pack
• Wiki: Documentation
• Video: Getting Started with Template 10 (on Microsoft Virtual Academy)

App Services

App Services are a very interesting concept for UWP applications that are more than just a simple self-contained “app”.

• Create and consume an app service
  
• Convert an app service to run in the same process as its provider
  
• Calling an App Service from a WPF/WinForms Win32 App
• Launch a Universal App from a WPF App contains the important part of how to reference Windows 10 APIs. When copying the XML code snippet in the blog post, leave out the reference to System.Runtime.dll and make sure you replace the typographical quotes (“example”) with plain quotes ("example").
  

App Services in a Network

• Discover remote devices
  
• Launch an app on a remote device
  
• Communicate with a remote app service

Personal Interests

My main motivation to start with UWP apps is to use the graphics and video capabilities that look much more attractive than what WPF has to offer.

Graphics and Animations

• Blog: robmikh blog (“A development blog about all things UWP and Composition”)
• Blog: Mike Taulty (“I do some developer stuff for Microsoft UK”)
• Articles on composition: https://mtaulty.com/category/composition/
• Articles on Win2D: https://mtaulty.com/category/win2d/
• Article: Windows 10 Anniversary Update–Fun with Composition and Video
• Website: Windows UI Dev Labs on github (“the place for getting the latest code samples and demos using Windows.UI.Xaml and Windows.UI.Composition to make beautiful Universal Windows Platform applications”)
• Article: How to prevent screen locks in your UWP apps
• Article: Creating a FluidBanner control using Windows Composition
• Library: CompositionProToolkit on github (“Collection of Helper classes and controls (using Win2d) for Windows.UI.Composition”)

MediaPlayer

• API reference
• Article on Windows Dev Center
• Video Shenanigins (article by Make Taulty)

Troubleshooting

Solutions for issues I ran into:

• How to disable “Missing XML comment” warning for auto generated code in Windows Store app? (StackOverflow)