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" />
    <...