👨‍💻☎ WinUI Community Call: September 15, 2021

[gabbybilka]

This live event has now ended, but you can view the recording on YouTube at the link below. If you didn't get your question answered, feel free to open it up as a question on this repo. Thanks all for joining!

https://youtu.be/vfQqT9h7tUc

Details

Date: September 15, 2021
Time: 16:00-17:00 UTC (9:00-10:00am Pacific)

Anyone and everyone is welcome - no pre-registration is required.
This will be an informal interactive live stream directly with members of our engineering team.

Format

The community call is a call among the WinUI team that is live-streamed onto YouTube. We present on new updates, share information, welcome guests, and answer your questions. In this month's call, we'll be sharing updates on the upcoming WinUI 2.7 release and WinUI 3 preview release. Additionally, we will be joined by Kahua to share their experience adopting WinUI and the Uno platform for their application.

Agenda

• Intro
• WinUI 3 release updates
• WinUI 2.7 release updates
• Kahua + Uno platform presentation & demo
• Q & A
  • Questions and topic requests can be pre-submitted by commenting them on this GitHub issue
  • Questions can be asked live in the YouTube livestream's comment section

Q&A Code of Conduct

• To help ensure Q&A remains beneficial for the majority of the call's developer audience, please consider whether your question could be framed so that it might be more broadly relevant to our larger developer audience by ensuring it is reasonably concise, broadly beneficial, well-suited for the fast-paced live Q&A format, or able to spark open ended discussion.
• Please understand some questions are not well-suited for the fast-paced live Q&A format and should be filed as standalone Discussion or Question issues where they can be most appropriately handled. Excluding presentation topic requests, this generally includes requests for dedicated follow-ups or technically complex questions that require investigative time or expertise not included in this month's guest list.

Leave us your questions in the comments on this issue or live in the YouTube chat during the stream!

[dylech30th]

Is there an estimated date to release the preview version of WinUI 3 with the Win 11 style capability, or do we have to wait for another month

[MEK3DK]

What is your best estimate for when WinUI 3 will be ready for large business applications? For example if Microsoft wanted to turn Visual Studio into WinUI 3, when would that be possible? With the current amount of bugs, performance issues and so on I would think that at least a year more is needed?

[sylveon]

Is there an estimate for when Mica support in XAML Islands will arrive for WinUI 2? I'd like to start using Mica in Windows 11.

[Lukespacewalker]

I have 2 question.

1. When will Mica material be available on WinUI 3.0 / Windows App SDK? I understand that it's available on WinUI2.6 on UWP but as UWP is receiving an underwhelming support from Microsoft such as it's still stuck with .NET 3.1. I don't think backport my .NET 5/6 applications back to .NET 3.1 is a good idea.
2. As when the MediaElement will be supported is still uncertain, is there any workaround on how to display video on WinUI 3.0 application?

[dylech30th]

There seems to be a bug that was inherited from the previous version(Project Reunion 0.5), as you can see in #5850, sometimes the framerate is still capped at 60fps. Are we going to fix this on the incoming versions? IMHO this does really impact the user experience, especially for those who are using a monitor with a higher refresh rate

[ghost1372]

Will WinUI 3 become open source? If yes, when? Will it be a new branch in microsoft.ui.xaml repository or will it have a new repository?

[ghost1372]

When can we use WinUI 3 in an unpackaged app? (Please provide a date)

[Cybrosys]

Are there any plans to add more preconfigured colors & brushes and add documentation of when to use which colors and brushes? Some colors/brushes are marked as "Legacy" but they're still used by non-legacy colors/brushes; it's all very confusing.

I've been going over the Figma Toolkit 2.6, Microsoft Teams UI Kit and other information related to the Fluent Design System but WinUI 3 is lacking a bit in supporting it. What are your plans with WinUI 3 in order to better support the Fluent Design System and help developers follow it?

I tried implementing a card view, using the preconfigured colors & brushes. When I got something looking decent in Light Mode it would have the wrong colors in Dark Mode. If I changed the colors to work in Dark Mode then Light Mode would have the wrong colors.

Here's an image from Microsoft Teams UI Kit of something I tried to mimic in WinUI 3. In the end I had to define the colors myself to achieve the result:

I feel that there's a discrepancy between WPF, UWP, versions of WinUI, Microsoft Teams UI Kit etc. in relation to the Fluent Design System and overall visual quality, look & feel out of the box. I was honestly surprised that WinUI 3 has a normal Win32 Title Bar and I had to start writing code if I wanted to replace it, causing all other manner of issues that I then had to try and resolve (custom title bar text color wouldn't change from black to grey when the window lost focus, had to find a style for it. If I gave it a background then the minimize, maximize and close buttons were no longer available, etc.).

[Hammerliu]

I have a question.
Now everyone is speculating that UWP will be abandoned. So according to Microsoft's documentation, WinUI on Windows, OpenXR on Hololens, and WP or WM is dead. These are the platforms that can run UWP Apps, so what about Xbox? That's also a platform that can run UWP Apps. There are still existence some developers working on unofficial music or video streaming Apps, and if UWP is no longer supported, is there a new technology to develop apps??

[rick-palmsens]

Are there any plans to improve error reporting in C#? More often than not I get unclear error messages when something goes wrong, and I have to resort to turning parts of the xaml on and off to find the culprit. "Catastrophic failure" is still one of my favorites.

Edit: Another fun one that just sort of happens randomly

[tuggernuts]

When can we expect WinUI 3 desktop app solutions that can target .net 6? Would like to reference my EF Core projects that are in .net 6 preview. Thanks!

[zhuxb711]

Just want to know when will we solve this issue #5768 as no official developer care about it in the last 20 days.

[anup-das]

I have 2 questions...

#1 When and how will WinUI 3 support XBOX platform for apps that are NOT games ?
Currently the development of XBOX apps that are NOT games is stuck to UWP + WinUI 2.x. XBox platform has disappeared from the recent roadmaps of both WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK. It was present earlier.

Will it be UWP + WinUI 3 (moving out of experimental) or
Win32 + AppContainer (Low IL) + WinUI 3 ?

#2 When will BreadcrumbBar control introduced in WinUI 2.6 be available for WinUI 3 ?

[MEK3DK]

Could you consider renaming WinUI 2 and/or 3? A normal part of a developers job is to use search engines to find solutions to problems and when there is both WinUI 2 and 3 it will be difficult to look for the right stuff.

A better solution would be to remove WinUI 2 and stop support for UWP, but that might take several years.

[ghost1372]

why Webview2 removed from WinUI 2.7.0-prerelease.210913003?

[sylveon]

@MEK3DK WinUI 3 still has not reached feature parity with WinUI 2/UWP so I don't think it's sound to do that until then.

[Pinox]

WinUI 3.0 desktop being part of MAUI. When will CLI commands be supported ? I still get errors using dotnet build + dotnet run.

[harvinders]

@gabbybilka Just sharing, Folks at Reactive UI recently added support for WinUI 3 desktop. It is available as a nuget package.

It would be a good idea to add it to the ecosystem/partner docs.

[MEK3DK]

@MEK3DK WinUI 3 still has not reached feature parity with WinUI 2/UWP so I don't think it's sound to do that until then.

@sylveon As I wrote we are years away from that solution.

And yes I agree WinUI 3 is not where it should be, but let's hope that enough resources are put into it, but as it was mentioned during the Q&A it is someone higher up in Microsoft that makes that decision.

[harvinders]

@ryandemopoulos You mentioned that porting 2.6 changes into WinUI 3 would span 1.0 and 1.1. Is this only for the fluent design changes or the newly added controls too would be included. Here, I am mostly interested in expander. Also, when would we expect to see new controls added in 2.7, especially info badge.