WinUI Community Call: January 22, 2025

[duncanmacmichael]

Please join us for the January 2025 edition of the WinUI Community Call. This event will be live-streamed to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqpQsQ8eKlU

Details

Date: Jan 22, 2025
Time: 17:00-18:00 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.

The WinUI and WindowsAppSDK teams are excited to share an overview of 1.7 experimental, a showcase of Windows Copilot Runtime APIs, and more! We can't wait to share what's coming next and look forward to seeing you all there!

Agenda

• Intro
• 1.7 updates: plans and status
• WCR APIs showcase
• 1.7 features
• XAML debugging tips
• 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!

[ghost1372]

Is there a plan to enhance Xaml for writing custom controls?
Some features, such as the AncestorType, are highly necessary.

ContentTemplate="{Binding ItemTemplate,RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType=local:StepBar}}"

[MEK3DK]

When moving from WPF to WinUI it is important to be able to host WinUI in your WPF program and also host you WPF components in a WinUI program.
In WPF/Forms we had the ElementHost and WindowsFormsHost, but no such convenience classes exists for WinUI.

It is possible to show WinUI above a WPF program using DesktopWindowXamlSource, but since it was added to WinUI in 1.4 it seems that work has stopped in this area?
The samples related to hosting in WinUI are either non-existing or very limited.

Is there any hope that you will put some focus into this area of hosting WPF in WinUI and WinUI in WPF?

[pjmlp]

I no longer care that much about WinUI, but for those that care, maybe address the question why keep talking about WinUI in C++, when these was the output of one year development, a couple of bug fixes, and no improvements on Visual Studio tooling for XAML C++?

https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/commits/master/?since=2024-01-01&until=2024-12-31

[ChaimCL]

The implicit view that can be felt is that MS only expects developers to consume C# but is too shy to state directly that “we no longer recommend the C++ approach to application development”.

[pjmlp]

Meanwhile developer preview 1.7 gets released with C++ projection only....

Go figure.

[knightmeister]

Far out that paints a depressing picture

[whiskhub]

Will you ever reconsider allowing community pull requests for WinUI 3?

Many bugs and issues require only minor changes to fix, but due to the seemingly limited capacity of the WinUI team, they are not being addressed. The community could easily resolve these issues and help improve the unfortunately underwhelming polish of WinUI 3.

[whiskhub]

Examples: #10239 #10262 #10289

[ghord]

Any news for general Drag&Drop support in elevated apps?

[ghost1372]

When will custom controls support AOT?

#10214

[enda-mullally]

Just checking - 09.00-10.00 PST is 17.00-18.00 UTC, typo above ?

[whiskhub]

@duncanmacmichael @codendone What time will the call be? Beware winter/summer time

[duncanmacmichael]

Oops, yes that was a typo. Corrected, thanks!

[Balkoth]

Why is styling on Windows 10 messed up since 1.6.0 and no one on the team cares to fix it: #10014

[Balkoth]

Why are apps in a remote desktop session broken since 1.6.0 and no one on the team cares to fix it: #10009

[MEK3DK]

Any plans to start working on the roughly 1800 WinUI 3 bugs?

The severe bugs and high bug count is the main reason for not moving to WinUI 3, not missing features.

[pfresnay]

Some news regarding UWP .NET 9 would be great :)

[adman-2025]

Will there be Xbox support?

[harvinders]

Any planned resolutions for Issue #6299, which pertains to the instantiating a UserControl from outside the application package (such as Optional Package) in WinUI 3. This limitation significantly impacts the development of extensible applications that rely on plugin architectures.

[dscavezze]

I’ve ported my app from UWP to WinUI3 and everything now works fine. However, I can’t get advertisements into my app. The ad companies I used in the past do not support WinUI3. They are apparently “working on it” but I have been waiting months, many months.

Is there some difficult problem serving ads to a WinUI3 app? Can Microsoft help the ad companies?

Dan

PS The companies I am referring to are: Vungle (now Liftoff Marketing) and AdsJumbo.

[ivanmalikov394]

ok

[whiskhub]

It was a bit concerning how @michael-hawker (XAML Lama) had to run the stream tech, moderate the presenters, collect chat questions, and then even answer questions on the WinUI roadmap mostly alone... Big props to him and the other presenters.

But why is there no management to support, with the authority to answer questions on the WinUI roadmap and similar? Or is there no such person at the company anymore? 🙁

[ghost1372]

Worse call ever
They don't even know what they're working on.

[pjmlp]

I am so happy to have moved on to other technology stacks.

Key questions ignored as usual, and most known faces since Windows 8 now gone.

[knightmeister]

Sadly, this call was disappointing. The product has so much potential but it seems to be so poorly managed.

For the first part of the call, until the Q&A, there was no mention or discussion of WinUI.

The first 25 minutes focused on the Windows App SDK, followed by another 20 minutes covering Visual Studio changes, such as XAML IntelliSense and packaging updates.

What’s the current status of the WinUI team? Does it still exist?

Additionally, the poor-quality text-to-speech was frustrating, mispronouncing words like "NuGet" as "nugget" and "driver" as "driv-ER."

[NicholasChrzan]

Next call it would be great if there could be some focus given to bug fixes at least some metrics about number triaged, closed, actively being worked on, etc. The reality is that the bugs and overall stability are a major factor in holding back adoption of the Windows App SDK. Every time we upgrade our version of the Windows App SDK we need to do a full regression test because there are almost always changes that either break functionality or cause random crashes. Right now, new features are much less of a concern vs overall platform stability.

[whiskhub]

The problem is, features are also a concern: closing the feature gap between "UWP" and WASDK, and especially WPF, UWP WinUI and WinUI 3. There is progress, as seen in the Community Call, but it's rather slow.

[NicholasChrzan]

In reality there was very little progress in features as well. What was shown are mostly what I'd consider low-hanging fruit which should have been done years ago. In reality Microsoft should really consider open sourcing or allowing community pull requests to improve functionality. The pace of bug fixes and feature parity show they aren't prioritizing or invested the Window App SDK, so why not let the community who is invested take some of the ownership of the library.

[pjmlp]

This the announcement of Project Reunion, back in 2020.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/09/22/kevin-gallo-microsoft-ignite-2020/

Followed by, six months later,

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announcing-project-reunion-0-5/

Now compare the roadmap of those visions, how many faces have gone through the community calls as taking over the reigns, and where everything still is, 5 years later.

Other than Windows Shell, I don't see why any of us that belived in the Windows 8 WinRT vision, still have to bother.

[connorMicrosoft]

Hey folks, we're super happy to share that several new AI APIs have gone live as part of our 1.7 Experimental 3 release! We really appreciate your patience and acknowledge this is releasing later than initially expected. We're excited for you to try them out! Please let us know your thoughts/feedback.

Release notes
Docs
Samples

[danielgruethling]

New APIs are great and all but I would prefer if the team would put more effort in squashing longstanding bugs and the current regressions.

Especially but not only these:

• WinUI3 apps using 1.6 SDK stop rendering in remote desktop #10009
• Crash in WinUI3 / SDK 1.6 in Microsoft_UI_Input!InputSiteHwndWinRT::PeekKeyboardMessageTime_Callback+0xd8 #10127
• NumberBox do not have their child controls on the visual tree when the NumberBox is initially invisible #8752
• WinUI 3 Cant instantiate a UserControl from a location outside the application package or directory (XamlParseException) #6299
• XAML x:Bind Selected Value won't bind to nullable int #6558
• Unable to use XamlReader.Load unless type is already used in a XAML file #7206 <- this one is especially annoying. I create a lot of controls only at runtime so I need to have a dummy xaml creating dummy instances of those...

There are some very old issues I can not remember on the top of my head which are bothering me for years now. I'll add those to the list once I remember.

[knightmeister]

Hi @duncanmacmichael, when's the next community call?

[ghost1372]

That time has passed (end of march/early april)

#10520

[ivanmalikov394]

ok