👨‍💻☎ WinUI Community Call: April 20, 2022

[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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNHGU6xmUzE

Details

Date: April 20, 2022
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 share the latest updates around WinUI 3 in Windows App SDK, @Scottj1s will be giving us a rundown of HybridCRT and the different CRT options for WASDK applications, and we'll be joined by @jlaanstra from the Phone Link (previously Your Phone) team to share their journey around how they migrated from UWP to Windows App SDK and WinUI 3.

Agenda

• Intro
• Spotlight: Phone Link. Check out Johan's sample repo for how they migrated from UWP to WinUI 3: https://github.com/jlaanstra/WinAppSDK-samples
• Latest news around WinUI 3 releases & content
• Deep dive into HybridCRT usage and development.
• 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 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!

[lukeblevins]

Need a better sense of when & by which mechanisms the servicing fix mentioned in an issue linked to this question will ship.

My project leverages TabView as a multitasking control with nested Frames in each TabViewItem and suffers from a large memory leak caused by the OS bug described in the hyperlink above.

Is there a workaround for consumers of TabView until the servicing fix ships?

[ghost1372]

when we can attach UI framework content to an AppWindow?
can we see this feature in v1.1.0?

[ghost1372]

When can we use all the multilingual capabilities like changing the language in runtime just like uwp? currently application must be restarted.

[artkat]

"Users are unable to drop an element when drag and drop is enabled."
When will this long-overdue issue finally be fixed?

[AndrewKeepCoding]

I'd like to know if we can expect a built-in DataGrid this year or it might take longer.

[harvinders]

I have asked this in the last community call (#6815 (comment)), asking again, hoping this time we (@llothar, @MEK3DK, @TheFanatr, @Poopooracoocoo, @iomismo, and @williamfigtree) get a response

Recently, the team has mentioned that they would like to concentrate on improving the quality and address fundamental infrastructure pieces. I am wondering if it would mean addressing an issue about loading Xaml controls using reflection from assemblies not part of the main app? This would enable many of us to start writing applications with plug-in architecture. Please see #6299 for more details. Can the team say if this issue comes under core infrastructure? Any hope of getting it fixed this year?

[harvinders]

It seems that many bug fixes from this repo are not making it to WinAppSDK 1.1 preview. Having said that, I really appreciate team fixing #6076.

Could the team share with us about the plan to bring these bug fixes to WinAppSDK. Some examples that come to mind, WinUI 3 Desktop still has tab items with shadows, the tabview still missing right top border after the last item, teaching tip fails to open if IsOpen is set to true whilst it is running close animation.

I think the team has fixed many many other issues and we would like to understand the timeline to bring these fixes to WinUI desktop as some are very critical for our projects.

[niels9001]

Question: when is the expected timeline for "Title bar customization APIs (Windows Apps SDK)" available on Windows 10 (now it's Windows 11 only)?

[niels9001]

Question: when is InfoBadge expected to be available in WinUI 3 (see #7001)?

[kmgallahan]

The C# WinUI 3 debug experience is pretty terrible at the moment (or at least my experience with it):

1. The native error messages clog up the debug output - this is at least just a minor nuisance though
2. Crashes from errors never point to the offending code - a long standing issue that will likely never go away
3. After hitting a breakpoint the Locals window in VS pretty much always shows this for everything:

4. Breakpoints can't be set after a program has launched as this error pops up almost every time:

The following breakpoint cannot be set:

At Somefile.cs, line 123 character 4
...

The breakpoint failed to bind.

Not that it matters though since variables can't be inspected most of the time anyways. I find I've regressed to using Debug.WriteLine to get values which is a blast from the past.

To help out here I recently gutted every line of code that doesn't depend on Microsoft.UI.XAML and dropped them into a "Core" library that can be run and tested with a normal debug experience. Definitely a good move that I would recommend for any project, but you still eventually need to debug the real program at some point.

I don't expect that this experience will get better anytime soon. I'm curious though if these are failings of C#/WinRT, Visual Studio, the packaging system, or something else - and what team has the power to improve things (if they desired, and if there isn't a technical roadblock too great to overcome).

My hope is that now the WinUI team is working on apps as explained in the last call that maybe you too will get frustrated enough with it for change to happen in this area...

[gabbybilka]

@MikeHillberg I believe you were wanting to check out @kmgallahan's question post-call?