WinUI Community Call

[jesbis]

Update:

Thanks everyone who was able to call in to our first community call! We really appreciate the interest, questions and feedback.

Recording download link

Temporary download link to the first call recording (OneDrive) - we're working on a better streaming/hosting approach and will update this link later.

After calling in or watching, please do fill in the survey to let us know if you have any feedback on the format or content:

https://aka.ms/winuisurvey

---

Hi everyone,

The WinUI team is planning to host a regular "community call" (via Microsoft Teams) and we'd like to invite you to suggest topics and call in!

Download a recurring calendar invite here (.ics):
https://aka.ms/WinUICommunityCall

We'll hold the first one next week on Wednesday, October 30 (9am PDT/12pm EDT/16:00 UTC).

This will be a very informal online call directly with members of our engineering team via Microsoft Teams.

Anyone and everyone is welcome! No pre-registration is required.

Proposed format:
When: last Wednesday of every month, 9:00am Pacific (16:00 or 17:00 UTC depending on DST)
Duration: ≤1 hr
How to attend: online via Microsoft Teams (invite: https://aka.ms/WinUICommunityCall)

Assuming we get enough interest then each month we can discuss and answer questions about Windows app development with WinUI including our roadmap, new features, and your feedback and suggestions.

Main topic areas could include:

• Upcoming conference sessions to watch for (e.g. Microsoft Ignite)
• WinUI 2 library
• WinUI 3 platform
  • with UWP, Win32, .NET Core, C++
  • Xaml Islands
• Open sourcing efforts
• Fluent Design
• UWP UI platform
• Native implementation for React Native Windows

Agenda for next week's call:

We'll have a small handful of WinUI team members and we'll project a screen + video feed from a conference room via Teams.

Anyone else is welcome to call in and watch/comment live!

Format will likely be:

1. Intro
   • About the call, agenda
   • Introduce WinUI team hosts
2. Recap WinUI roadmap and strategy: what is WinUI, what is the roadmap, why are we doing it
3. Maybe a demo of what we're working on
4. We'll talk about top issues that are raised in this thread
5. We'll answer any of your other live questions until we run out of time

Interested?

Please let us know and leave a comment with any topics or questions you'd like to hear about!

We can't promise to cover everything but we'll do our best next week or in a future call.

[adrientetar]

Yeah I think a big question is whether WinUI 3 will run on NET Core and if so, does that mean it gets the full API surface of NET Core even though there's the sandbox (e.g. can we use File not just StorageFile?)

[dpaulino]

I'd like to hear about WinUI/UWP and dotnet core 3.0.

Also, I'd like to hear if XAML Standard is in the works (winui and xamarin should use same xaml syntax)

[mdtauk]

Will it be recorded for watching after the fact?

[mdtauk]

Yeah I think a big question is whether WinUI 3 will run on NET Core and if so, does that mean it gets the full API surface of NET Core even though there's the sandbox (e.g. can we use File not just StorageFile?)

BTW I believe the Sandbox becomes optional, if you want an app to run on Hololens, Surface Hub Xbox, etc. Otherwise you should have access to the whole Win32 API surface if it's a Desktop only app.

Not sure what runtime will be recommended for Surface Neo and Surface Pro X :)

[jesbis]

Thanks, keep the questions coming! We can definitely go over things like .NET Core plans, UWP sandboxing, etc.

We are planning to record so people can watch afterward, though it's TBD where else we'll upload it.

[mdtauk]

Thanks, keep the questions coming! We can definitely go over things like .NET Core plans, UWP sandboxing, etc.

We are planning to record so people can watch afterward, though it's TBD where else we'll upload it.

Mixer and YouTube would probably work, Channel9 seems to have become a hub for content stored elsewhere

[kmgallahan]

Could you clarify the format of this call a bit more? It sounds like:

1. You are asking for topic suggestions right now in this issue
2. You'll then have X number of people (as many as feel like participating?) join a Teams conference call (hopefully all on mute?)
3. MS folks will then talk about a suggested topic for a bit
4. Then it opens up to a Q&A session about the topic?
5. Repeat for different topics through the 1 hour time limit?

[jesbis]

@kmgallahan updated the issue to include the agenda/format we're thinking of - is that clearer?

It's basically what you outlined 😊 Open to all, no registration required.

We'd like to cover issues/questions that come up ahead of time in this thread, but will probably also do some live q&a as time allows.

[ryandemopoulos]

@kmgallahan To add to what @jesbis said, I'll say that I hope people aren't muted the whole time; one goal of these calls is to facilitate discussion and bring more of a community feel to it, instead of a "MSFT people talk at us for an hour"-type feel. We want it to have back and forth, and as long as it doesn't get out of hand where people are constantly talking over each other, I'd like to mix in questions in the midst of the subjects we cover and have an atmosphere of audible dialog at any time.

We're also going to be learning how to do this well--the first few attempts at this might be a bit of a cluster, and that's OK. :) Suggestions on how to run them, in addition to the content itself, are welcome!

[mdtauk]

More group conversation, less Windows Insider webcast. (not to say one is better than the other though)

[ryandemopoulos]

@mdtauk Yeah. There's a place for both for sure. I'm hoping this has more of a conversation-y feel. We'll still have specific topics and we'll need a moderator to keep us from going too deeply down a rabbit hole, but I'm hoping that people feel free to engage and participate in the dialog alongside whatever topics we're covering.

[kmgallahan]

What I'd like to avoid is how the Windows Insider live stream sessions tend to go:

1. MS Folks have one topic they eventually present about after 20 minutes of introductions and technical issues
2. Completely random questions about every possible aspect of Windows are asked in the chat throughout the stream, sometimes being answered when asked, then ~20 dedicated Q&A minutes towards the end

The aimlessness and repetitive nature of the questions gets a bit old after watching 1-2 of the livestreams.

We're also going to be learning how to do this well

If I could suggest one single thing > please work out your audio/visual/hardware/streaming software/Mixer/other technical issues long before the stream starts. I don't even want to think about how many man-hours have been wasted waiting on technical issues with the Insider streams to get resolved...

[ryandemopoulos]

@kmgallahan Great suggestions there. Yeah, the "repetitive" thing is good insight. (@jesbis, take notice of that point and let's think about how we can safeguard against that)

The point about technical issues is a good one too. We're pretty good at running Teams meetings internally here at Microsoft since that's how everyone does their meetings inside the company these days. However, we're not quite experts at doing these with a broad group of external folks; we might have to test-run this once or twice. We'll try to get it working reasonably well on the first shot!

[mdtauk]

@mdtauk Yeah. There's a place for both for sure. I'm hoping this has more of a conversation-y feel. We'll still have specific topics and we'll need a moderator to keep us from going too deeply down a rabbit hole, but I'm hoping that people feel free to engage and participate in the dialog alongside whatever topics we're covering.

Do you see this becoming a monthly thing? The dot Net team do design reviews for their APIs out in the open.

[dbeavon]

I'm really looking forward to this!

It would be helpful to hear an update on the winui3 roadmap. I am eager to try the new chromium-edge; I haven't yet heard of any preview of that control for win32.net or Uwp.net either. Also I'm very interested in data validation. There has been discussion about adding this into Uwp for several years and I'm hoping we will finally get something in winui3.

It may be helpful if you could start with introductions so we know what team(s) are on the call. I get confused by the boundaries between different teams- Winui, community toolkit, xaml tools, vs templates and compiler tool chains, etc. As one example of my confusion, I have no idea who owns compile-and-launch for Uwp- xaml in visual studio. I have had substantial trouble in the past while attempting to compile-and-launch my Uwp projects and libraries in a reasonable amount of time, for productivity sake. (It is multiple times slower to compile Uwp-xaml than wpf xaml for the same set of user controls.) Initially I was certain that the vs community feedback was the right place to report these concerns ... but they told me to come here.... However I don't find many other issues related to visual studio tooling ; so this doesn't seem to be the right place for it either.

Finally, I'd like to understand - even at a high level - what types of devs are most successfully using Uwp- xaml today. I get the impression that the primary audience is still the native c++ devs . It seems as if the .net and Enterprise devs are theoretically able to build apps with Uwp- xaml ... but wpf is hard to beat I'm terms of power and productivity. Sorry for the long comment. Maybe we will need more than one hour!

[ryandemopoulos]

@mdtauk Monthly is the plan; last Wed of every month. (except not December lol)

I'm not sure we want to use this specific forum for design reviews for APIs; we've talked a bit about doing open reviews but I think that's a more formal thing that we'd want a bit more structure around. At least that's my initial thought at the moment.

[ryandemopoulos]

Question for everyone: You all good with us starting on time for these? (as in, no later than 9:01 or 9:02 and we don't wait for a lot of folks to join late) I kinda want to set the tone of "we start on time" to maximize the time we have for actual content/dialog.

Edit: 9:01am refers to pacific time; obviously translate to whatever timezone you're all in. :)

[kmgallahan]

I second @dbeavon's request, but specifically it would be great to get an overview of all the teams that touch WinUI in some way:

• What are the teams and their responsibilities?
• Rough headcounts would be interesting
• Who are the PMs, and more importantly I suppose, who are folks that like open communication with the community?
• Where do all these little Github avatars & faces fit in to the teams? :-D

[mdtauk]

Question for everyone: You all good with us starting on time for these? (as in, no later than 9:01 or 9:02 and we don't wait for a lot of folks to join late) I kinda want to set the tone of "we start on time" to maximize the time we have for actual content/dialog.

Edit: 9:01am refers to pacific time; obviously translate to whatever timezone you're all in. :)

As long as there is a way to re-watch then people can catch up on things

@mdtauk Monthly is the plan; last Wed of every month. (except not December lol)

I'm not sure we want to use this specific forum for design reviews for APIs; we've talked a bit about doing open reviews but I think that's a more formal thing that we'd want a bit more structure around. At least that's my initial thought at the moment.

I wasn't suggesting that the development take place on video, just giving an example of how another open source project is using video. So you could try things out, and decide on how you want to make use of these "Team Huddles" to help all your work out!

[niels9001]

Great initiative!

I was wondering if there will be any designers from the Fluent Design team as well. Would be nice to hear more what's coming next for Fluent (remember the Waves?) since it's a big part of WinUI.

[rizamarhaban]

Question:
Can we use Win2D with WinUI and if not, is there similar powerful graphics such as Win2D or possibly full DirectX and OpenGL support for .NET Core 3 Desktop that uses WinUI?

[dpaulino]

One more question I had, is there a plan to advocate WinUI to both internal teams at Microsoft and external devs?

I noticed on Twitter someone from the dotnet team felt that there was no way to build modern UI using native Windows frameworks. He felt that the web was the only way to build a modern UI today. But he only included WinForms and WPF in his analysis, so he ignored WinUI and UWP.

In the spirit of One Microsoft, it would be great if there was a plan to create more unity between the dotnet team and the WinUI team.

[knightmeister]

Also, I'd like to hear if XAML Standard is in the works (winui and xamarin should use same xaml syntax)

Yes, big +1 for this. Would be great to see the Xamarin flavour more closely match WPF and WinUI. It drives me nuts going back and forth as I'm working on both platforms presently.

Will it be recorded for watching after the fact?

As much as I'd love to attend, I think it's unlikely given it is 2am in Australia at that time. Would definitely like to watch a stream the following day though.

In the spirit of One Microsoft, it would be great if there was a plan to create more unity between the dotnet team and the WinUI team.

More consistency and less electron would be :D

[adrientetar]

What's the status of AppWindow? Is it still being developed and will it come out of preview? It will only be for the UWP app model?

[SavoySchuler]

Sharing Gavin William's question from Twitter:

Can we get a template for WinUI in a C#/UWP application.
Can we use WinUI with CoreApp?

[shaheedmalik]

@kmgallahan

There aren't going to be any more UWP UI updates beyond security & critical fixes

You know, humans are people and people can tell WHITE lies.

The CShell Windows components use UWP XAML, Input and Composition. So, why (more accurately how) do they obselete it? More variants of the CShell (aka Windows 10X) are coming, It's a critical component of Windows.

Either they move the namespace to WindowsInternal.UI.* or Windows.Internal.UI.* inside the WinMD and keep the old one for compat reasons or just increment the contract version and make the WinMD private.

The current Public APIs are here: %WinDir%\System32\WinMetadata

Sure, we may not have access to the System UI framework within Windows 10 > 20H1. But all the cool stuff will be inside Windows.Internal.* or WindowsInternal.* namespaces, the files conveniently named inside System32 directory. Go ahead and look there, you'll be surprised.

It's like all over Vista again, where they move the good stuff (DirectUI) into Windows, then giving us the baseline (WPF).

Windows 10X and Windows Core are going to be running on WinUI 3, that's why they are delayed until 2020 as 20H1 with WinUI 3.0 isn't available yet.

[mdtauk]

So some clarity on
When/if the Windows team will adopt WinUI 3.0 for it's inbox apps and the Composable Shells?
and
When Windows.UI.Xaml will be deprecated by Internal teams?

[jesbis]

Hi all,

We uploaded a recurring event you can add to your calendar here (.ics):

https://aka.ms/WinUICommunityCall

or

https://microsoft.github.io/microsoft-ui-xaml/communitycalls/WinUICommunityCall.ics

We're hoping you can all make it on Wednesday! (or watch a recording after)

[shaggygi]

@jesbis

We are planning to record so people can watch afterward, though it's TBD where else we'll upload it.

Why couldn't this be part of .NET Foundation on YouTube and streamed live like the other shows?

//cc @jongalloway on thoughts/help

[jesbis]

Why couldn't this be part of .NET Foundation on YouTube and streamed live like the other shows?

Thanks for the suggestion!

WinUI isn't specific to .NET and isn't a .NET Foundation project, but we'll make sure we can host the recordings somewhere.

We'll be streaming live through the Teams call if you'd like to join!

[jevansaks]

FYI we are hearing that the .ics file isn't working for some folks. Here is the teams link. We will be starting at 9am PDT.

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_Yjk2OTFmZDctN2I2OS00MGU4LTg1NWYtOWYwOWFlODg0YzIz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2272f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2230968ce2-cf69-410d-a009-09ed2ecefbdb%22%7d

[shaheedmalik]

I tried the link but I couldn't hear anything but it might've been over already?

[jesbis]

Thanks everyone who was able to call in to our first community call! We really appreciate the interest, questions and feedback.

We're working on the recording for anyone who wasn't able to call in.

Please do fill in the survey to let us know if you have any feedback on the format or content:

https://aka.ms/winuisurvey

[shaheedmalik]

Thanks everyone who was able to call in to our first community call! We really appreciate the interest, questions and feedback.

We're working on the recording for anyone who wasn't able to call in.

Please do fill in the survey to let us know if you have any feedback on the format or content:

https://aka.ms/winuisurvey

I missed it. Could the next ones be streamed to Mixer?

[jesbis]

@shaheedmalik sorry you couldn't make it live! What do you like about Mixer over Teams?

[shaheedmalik]

@jesbis I mean in addition to for the replay.

I had a bit of trouble setting up Teams for it when I really just wanted to listen in.

[Nirmal4G]

@jesbis

You could ask @shanselman and @jongalloway for format on Community Standups. I really like their format. Me and many others expressed interest on bringing the similar format across .NET, they delivered.

If you need some guidance, you could ask them and others hosting the .NET Community Standups. Including @Golnaz89 who's been there since the ASP.NET Community Standup moving into M$FT Ch9 studio.

[harvinders]

@jesbis
The survey asks the question

Did you attend or watch the October 30 WinUI community call?
Attended
Watched a recording
Didn't attend or watch

However, I could not find any links here to the recording. Could someone please post the link to the recording.

Thanks

[mdtauk]

@harvinders Perhaps wait until the recording has been made available, before submitting your survey?

[mdtauk]

Please work with C# lang team so you can speed up development of these features and more, so we can avoid using XAML, and make it easier to design UIs in a declarative way (SwiftUI/Compose/Flutter)

• dotnet/csharplang#1151
• dotnet/csharplang#2657

Also this? #804

[shaheedmalik]

Is the recording up yet?

[mdtauk]

no, what you want is a "new" language

what i suggest is no new language, just C#

reason why SwiftUI/Flutter/Compose works is because you only have to learn and use 1 and only 1 language

so in order to achieve this, C# needs to implement new features to allow writting DSLs easily and more powerful

why just one language ?

• Less dependencies
• Easier to teach
• Easier to use
• Less Frictions
• Faster and more Performant

I wasn't making a request or suggestion, but opening a discussion topic on alternative ways to making UI with WinUI 3.0 that is not XAML. I think this qualifies in some ways, but what you are asking for are language features for C# to enable you to use it for making UI.

[jesbis]

Hi folks - here's a temporary download link to the first call recording (OneDrive) - we're looking into a better streaming/hosting approach with .NET and Channel9 for the future.

[Angr1st]

Maybe if you want to build a DSL for WinUI, you could try F#

[dbeavon]

I have it myself, since I was on the call. But is there any way to capture and publish the chat from the call? There was lots of good interaction with Dmitry Lyalin, etc.

[jevansaks]

I have it myself, since I was on the call. But is there any way to capture and publish the chat from the call? There was lots of good interaction with Dmitry Lyalin, etc.

If you join the teams call again, the chat should all be there from last time. I don't know of a way to save off all of the chat in one go, unfortunately. If you figure it out maybe you can post the chat log?