👨‍💻☎ WinUI Community Call: March 15, 2023

[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 a Q&A discussion. Thanks all for joining!

Due to a technical issue we needed to reupload the video recording, it is available here: https://aka.ms/winuicall-03-15-23

Details

Date: March 15, 2023
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.

Agenda

• Intro
• WinUI Gallery updates
• Technical challenges developing the WinAppSDK File Explorer
• Latest news regarding WinAppSDK & WinUI
• Q&A

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 Q&A discussions 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!

[eduardobragaxz]

It would be great to have someone like Savoy again, to fish the questions, rather than leave it up to people to fish them themselves.

[MEK3DK]

Yes the February call ended in chaos, but hey it is WinUI 3 ;-)

[JanRajnoha]

Are you planning work (solve or close unrelated) on backlog? According to GitHub Insights, backlog is getting bigger and bigger and for people it is reason, why they are not using Win App SDK.

[sotanakamura]

I think Almost all of issues are problems on programming, not bugs.

[JanRajnoha]

It doesn't matter. The problem is, there are too many issues, where some serious problems could be overseen. And how I wrote in original comment, this is indication for many devs why they are not using it -> too much issues looks suspicious and could look like dead project.

[sotanakamura]

I agree with you. What I want to say is there are many issues to close easily. Closing these issues helps WinUI 3 team to focus on serious bugs and WinUI 3 project to look active.

[JanRajnoha]

Oh, yeah, I agree. It missing option to close issue by users

[jschwizer99]

What is the process at MS for releasing features with a preview flag?

The tree view SelectionChanged() event feature has been merged for over 2 years #2063. It was marked with a preview flag. But it seems currently not accessible in the code (1.2.4 and 1.3.0 preview1). I would expect that at least in a preview-marked version it should be accessible. See also microsoft/WindowsAppSDK#2690 and #6585.

[Diegorro98]

What is the standard to save sensitive data in WindowsAppSDK/UWP ? I'm building an open source application that stores user tokens that should not be accesible. At the moment I'm using DataProtectionProvider to generate a buffer that latter will be transformed to a string using base64 encoding and stored in settings using CommunityToolkit.WinUI.Helpers.ApplicationDataStorageHelper (Save and read methods).

Is this secure enough to avoid easy or not so easy readings? Or there is another ways to achieve certain level of sensitive data protection?

[omikhailov]

For UWP it is PasswordVault and encryption

[terrycox]

You might look at Doppler

[AathifMahir]

Are there any plans for improvement to XAML in General, Xaml has always been the same from the beginning. Regardless of Modern Techniques and etc..

For Example:

• Custom Xaml Binding Like Maui
• Improvements for Compiled Bindings
  Etc..

[ghost]

Oh how I miss the ease-of-use of WPF Style Triggers! If that could be revived, it would be so beneficial. And using the VisualStateManager, or even the new way of handling control states and colors for hover, mousedown, etc. using Resources is just so much more verbose and dirty. Everything was so much easier in WPF.

[lhak]

Any update on #3665? This issue basically blocks my application from using winui 3 (still having to use the now unsupported .net core 3 and XAML islands) and probably impacts all applications using win2d by leaking gigabytes of gpu memory.

[DominicMaas]

hmmm, I'm tracking down an issue with customers stating that an app I'm developing can use gigabytes of GPU memory (like 16GB) after running for a few days (I just reprod today it with about 24 hours of running)

Although not the same as your issue, I'm not using Win2D directly (just via Shadows I think), and the user cannot resize the window.

Need to keep this in mind while I keep digging to find the issue.....

EDIT: I think this is unlikely the same issue. Might actually have to do with the RotatorTile control, or something I'm doing wrong. Need to wait and see

[Diegorro98]

Has the use of SVG images as app icons in the Start Menu and Taskbar been discussed internally at Microsoft? What are your thoughts?

[koenvd]

Can we get an update again on MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback#3003 (aka WinUI3 WebView2 mouse stop working while keyboard is still working)? Much appreciated!

[JanRajnoha]

Any new info on agenda? @gabbybilka

[gabbybilka]

Updated, see above.

[Ccarmichael92]

Any short term plan to decouple webview2 from windows app sdk?

[MarkBrainfire]

I'm looking forward to a great meeting!

[kmgallahan]

1. Do you foresee WASDK / WinUI 3 ever updating to use the XAML 2009 spec like MAUI?

2. Is anyone still working on Win2D? Plans?

3. Any plans to make improvements to the Visual Studio WinUI development experience? (literally anything at all in the next ~year)

4. In WinUI project files, are the automatically created entries referencing XAML files actually used for anything? Removing <None Remove="*.xaml/> & <Page Update="*.xaml" ... /> doesn't seem to change the build process at all.

5. Most (all?) of the code in the public WinUI repo references Windows.UI.Xaml namespace (WinUI 2). Does that imply all the WinUI 3 code resides in a private parallel repo? If yes, will that code be made public (at the WinUI 3 counterparts for what is already public from WinUI 2). Are there major differences besides the namespaces?

[kmgallahan]

Would it be possible to add support for the XmlnsDefinition & XmlnsPrefix assembly attributes to improve XAML namespace declarations?

Or otherwise some form of Global Usings but for XAML namespaces.

[AathifMahir]

Xaml been due on major improvements for years now, hope they'd start working on improvements to xaml very soon

[JanRajnoha]

Will be Community Call this month? @gabbybilka

[gabbybilka]

Yes, on the 19th. The discussion for questions to be answered during Live Q&A will be posted soon.