Windows

Unwrapping WinUI3 for C++

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The Windows UI Library 3, known shortly as WinUI 3, is a native UI framework that ships with the Windows App SDK. This is an SDK complementary to the Windows SDK, WPF, WinForms, and Win32. It provides a new unified set of APIs and tools that can be used to develop desktop apps on Windows 11 (as well as downwards to Windows 10, version 1809). I decided to have a look at what this framework provides and this post is written as I am trying it. To evaluate it, I’ll try to build a small application that does conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees as you type in a field.

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Highlights from Microsoft Build 2020

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The Microsoft Build 2020 event happened this week, and, unlike all previous editions, it was a digital event only. Moreover, it was also free, so everybody could attend the 48 hours marathon. Microsoft made a lot of announcements and released various products and services for Windows, Azure, Office, Visual Studio, Edge, and more. In this post, I will summarize the things that I found the most interesting for me.

Using Microsoft Edge in a native Windows desktop app – part 3

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This article has been updated for the version of WebView2 that requires Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime 88.0.705.50 or newer. In the previous article, we learned how to create a web view and display web content in a Windows desktop application. In this third article of the series, we will look in detail at navigation and … Read more

Using Microsoft Edge in a native Windows desktop app – part 2

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In the second part of this series, we will see how to use the WebView2 control in a C++ Windows desktop application. We will use a single document interface MFC application that features a toolbar where you can specify an address to navigate to and buttons to navigate back and forward as well as reloading the current page or stopping navigation.

App.xaml requires an ApplicationDefinition Build Action

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I was working on transforming a Windows Store app into an Universal app so that it worked not just for Windows Store but also for Windows Phone. When you do this two new projects are added to the solution. One of them is a special one, called shared project that you can use to keep … Read more

Why won’t my .NET redistributable assemblies show up in Visual Studio’s ‘Add Reference’ dialog?

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The Problem You install a .NET redistributable package and want to reference the assemblies in your project. However, though everything is correctly installed to GAC, the assemblies don’t show up in Visual Studio’s Add Reference dialog in the .NET tab (regardless of what version of Visual Studio you have). The Cause Redistributable assemblies are intended … Read more

Keyboard input and TAB navigation between WPF controls in a Win32 application

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It is possible to host WPF controls in a Win32 application, and the other way around, but because of the differences betweeb these technologies there are various issues that can appear. One of these is handling of keyboard input. Without diving too much into differences between WPF and Win32, I will show how to provide … Read more

How to Determine What Process Loaded a DLL

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Trying to figure out in which process a particular DLL is currently loaded, I have found two solutions (perhaps there are more). Solution 1: tasklist.exe tasklist /m <modulename>.dll Solution 2: listdlls.exe (from sysinternals) listdlls -d <modulename>.dll It might be that listdlls is more reliable than tasklist. I have ran into cases when tasklist failed to … Read more