The UWP Files: First Steps (Premium)

I spent a lot of time researching UWP and Xamarin Forms over the weekend and decided to renew my efforts to port .NETpad to UWP first.

I spent a lot of time researching the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Xamarin Forms over the weekend and decided to renew my efforts to port .NETpad to UWP. And I think I’ll handle this as I did with the WPF port of this Notepad clone: First, I’ll write generally about what I’m doing from time-to-time and then, if there’s a demand for it, I’ll document the process in a series of step-by-step articles.

This doesn’t mean I’m done with the WPF version of .NETpad, or even the WinForms version for that matter. But in the interest of pushing forward quickly, I thought it would be useful to press on with a newer and more modern framework. And while UWP is pretty much the end of the road in a variety of ways, it’s also more modern than WPF and has some interesting advantages.

As you may recall, I made some first steps with a UWP version of .NETpad previously, and I wrote about my earliest experiences back in February. At that time, I noted my struggles with UWP’s support for the Windows 10 dark and light color schemes, and its requirements that I use theme dictionaries to customize how the app looks in both cases. Rafael was a big help with that.

Since then, I’ve started over and have moved past what I had previously accomplished. My big concerns for the UWP version are custom dialogs, weird missing bits of functionality, and what I assume will be a long list of things that are harder, for some reason, in UWP.

UWP, like WPF, doesn’t provide a Font dialog or even a Font picker of any kind, but given my experience building one in WPF, I think I’ll be able to make that happen. UWP does apparently provide a Color picker, however, so I will use that in a custom dialog or pane or whatever. And it supports native File Open and Save/Save As dialogs. The app can already open text files, so the basics should all work.

UWP handles user/application settings differently than WinForms and WPF in that there’s no visual designer anymore, so it’s all code-based now. I’m good with that, and it looks straightforward.

There are weird little things. Microsoft added support for traditional menus to UWP a few years ago, and they mostly work fine. But you can’t easily add a checkbox to a menu item, so I need to figure that out so I can correctly check menu items like Format > Word Wrap and View > Status Bar.

Speaking of which, there’s no status bar control either. But that’s fine, I implemented it using text blocks in a Stack Panel, similarly to how the WPF version of the app works.

<StackPanel Name="StatusBar1" Grid.Row="2" Orientation="Horizontal">
    <TextBlock Name="AutoSaveTextBlock" Text="Auto Save: Off" Padding="10,10,50,10" />
    <TextBlock Name="PositionTextBlock" Text="Ln 1, Col 1" Padding="10,10,50,10" />
    <TextBlock Name="ZoomTextBlock" Text="100%" Padding="10,10,50,10" />
    <TextBlock Name="WordCountTextBlock" Text="0 words" Padding="10,10,50,10" />
</StackPanel>

Keyboard shortcuts are surprisingly easier in UWP than they were in WPF, which is nice: You can implement them inline in the XAML file (for each menu item, for example) and then customize the keyboard shortcut hint in the menu too. So that’s all good.

<MenuFlyoutItem Text=”Open” Name=”OpenMenu” Click=”OpenMenu_Click” KeyboardAcceleratorTextOverride=”Ctrl+O”><MenuFlyoutItem.KeyboardAccelerators><KeyboardAccelerator Modifiers=”Control” Key=”O” /></MenuFlyoutItem.KeyboardAccelerators></MenuFlyoutItem>

So far, I’ve got File > Open, File > Exit, Word Count, Edit > Time/Date, Format > Word Wrap, and View > Status Bar working. It supports light and dark color schemes correctly and dynamically. And there are some niceties built-in to UWP that the app just takes advantage of automatically, like spell-check.

The big next steps are those custom dialogs and the Font/Color picker implementations. We’ll see how well that goes. Then I’ll work on moving the control resources into a separate file—they’re currently clogging up MainPage.xaml—and figuring out UWP’s support for app/user settings. I’m also just using basic Click events for the menu items, but I will be investigating how UPW handles commands and will likely move them all over eventually.

Should keep me busy for a while. More soon.