WinUIpad: Now Available on GitHub ⭐

I took about a week off after posting the previous update, and then the better part of the following week trying to figure out whether I could overwrite the GitHub repository for the single document version of WinUIpad somehow. I'm sure that's possible, but I couldn't make it work. So I decided to create a new GitHub repository for the multiple document/tab version of WinUIpad instead.

This was my March 2026 focus project, though work remains. As with other focus months, it will continue into the future, albeit at a slower pace. But I don't want to lose track of what still needs to be done here. Fortunately, I listed most of the bugs and missing features in the previous article, so here I will simply describe what I've changed since.
Line ending and encoding format
This is difficult to remember, but in 2020 I paused writing my Programming Windows series—which later became the book Windows Everywhere—about halfway through the history because I had arrived at the .NET era and needed to cover that and technology, C#, and frameworks like Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). By that point, I had stopped actively developing software, so I wasn't as familiar with .NET as I had been with previous Microsoft developer efforts. So I took some time—almost two years, as it turns out—to learn as much as I could. I started writing code in .NET, and the result was an app, eventually called .NETpad, that I'm still working to this day: WinUIpad is just the most modern version of that same app.

Even more difficult to remember, the Programming Windows series came about in part because I had had this thought that the central innovation of Visual Basic, and of the latter .NET-based frameworks that followed, was that one could spend most of their time creating a Windows app by constructing the UI—visually in VB, and then using XAML code in the .NET era—while the "glue" code that made it all work, the "code behind," as Microsoft calls it, would be minimal. This turned out to be false, especially for more involved apps and in the .NET era when visually creating UIs became less feasible. But it fed my desire to create .NETpad (and then WinUIpad), multiple times, using multiple languages and frameworks. And here we are, almost seven years after I started that series and over six years after I created the first (Visual Basic.NET, Windows Forms, and .NET Framework-based) version of .NETpad.

I was pretty happy with my ability to recreate the Notepad of the day, and .NETpad even includes a few features, like theme support, that the original lacked. But there were a few more technical Notepad features I never figured out despite multiple attempts. Key among them are Notepad's support for multiple line ending types and encoding formats, both of which are tied to interoperability with UNIX and UNIX-like systems and to the evolution of Windows itself. Today, almost anyone using Notepad will simply use the defaults—Windows-style line endings and...