I have developed applications for Android and iOS using DevExtreme framework.
Can we develop windows desktop apps using Devextreme?
If yes please provide guidelines or steps to get started.
Please help on this.
Are you looking for something like this?
https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/T135296
Yes, you can do it. I suppose you use Visual Studio to develop windows apps. If so, the DevExtreme Multi-Channel project template supports WinJS app.
Just create a new Multi-Channel app:
Then, you will be able to select WinJS project template:
The DevExtreme documentation contains some information about WinJS development.
Also, I suppose, you can use Electron. Unfortunately, I have no experience with this tool. And there is one restriction here: Electron supports Windows 7 and later.
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I'm a Windows developer and have written all sorts of windows client applications using C++ and C#. I wanted to write an Android app and put it on the Google Store, but I'm only equipped with Visual Studio.
I wanted to ask if it is realistic to think that I can create an app, from scratch, including engine and UI using Xamarin only. I saw there are a few Xamarin samples out there, but I didn't want to start only to find out that it's not enough for some reason.
Currently I'm struggling a bit in getting my environment right, but thought I'd throw this question here to you guys ... Maybe it's not even worth starting?
Thanks.
Yes, Xamarin can be used to develop Android apps from scratch. Xamarin has two main libraries that help with this.
Xamarin.Android will give you access to all the Android APIs directly from c#. Note that you still need to know the basic Android concepts like what is an Activity and an Intent.
The other library is Xamarin.Forms. It is a cross-platform library that will give you a basic set of UI controls and widgets that you declare usong an xml syntax, and program with C#. This library has a few limitations, but you can also use the features of Xamarin.Android alongside it to get at the missing features.
Some advice: if possible, develop and debug directly on an Android tablet. Android emulators are not that good and hard to configure. Hope this helps.
There are 2 types of Xamarin you can use.
Xamarin Forms : Which is the unified version that use XAML for the UI. It is very recommended to use this if you are building a simple application.
Xamarin Native : The "native" version of platform that are written in C#, if you want to create Android-only apps, I really recommend this, since it's very similar with the native Android code, but it's wrapped using C# (You can still using nuget package).
I am looking to develop a Windows 10 Universal app based in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for use on Microsoft Surface tablets primarily. I have found information that says it can be done on this page, but at the very bottom of the page it says it is in beta. However, I can't seem to find anything more than that post. No updates, or documentation or anything. Does anyone know if you can do this from the PhoneGap app on Mac OS?
If not, I guess the next best option it to do it on a Windows machine using Visual Studio 2017 and Cordova?
Any information anyone has on this subject would be helpful.
Thanks!
No, I am pretty sure you can't build UWP apps on macOS. The reason is quite similar as the reason you cannot build iOS apps on Windows - you could build the JS portion of your code, but the problem is the fact that UWP build tools and SDKs are OS specific and unless Microsoft specifically ports them to macOS, they cannot work there.
You could use Parallels and run Windows as second OS, or use a build server to build the app in the cloud. Visual Studio App Center is a very good solution for you purpose as it allows you to configure a full build pipeline including UWP, iOS and Android builds.
You can actually develop a UWP app using phoneGap on Mac if you are building it using web technologies. (HTML, CSS, Javascript) But you can not build/publish the app on Mac, but if you have a Creative Cloud account, you can use Phone Gap Build to upload it to the service and have it built there.
In Visual Studio I am trying to decide which type of application I should start with. I want to make it available to as many devices as I can.
If I make a Windows desktop application (.NET/WPF), I could convert it to a UWP but it only targets desktop applications, which is pointless device-wise.
But if I make a UWP, it would work with Microsoft devices, but not ones running a Windows older than Windows 10. A lot of people still use older versions of Windows, and I would rather make a Windows desktop application than limit the use to a specific version of Windows.
It would also be cool to be able to make it work on other devices like Android.
QUESTIONS: Is there a way to convert a Desktop application to a Universal UWP (with or without the code)? Is there a way to convert a Universal UWP to a Desktop application (or make it run on older Windows machines)? If not, what would be the best application type and why?
Also, is there a different application type I should use instead that I'm not thinking of?
NOTE: Microsoft Project Centennial converts Desktop applications to UWP's, but they only work on desktop machines.
I would go UWP and use Xamarin forms if I were you.
Using Xamarin you can write the one UWP app and deploy to Windows, Android, and iOS.
You answered most of your question yourself already. You have the following options (considering you want to continue using your .NET/XAML skillset as you mention WPF and are not looking into a web alternative):
Write a desktop app in WPF: you want to support Windows 7 or need features that are currently not available yet in UWP (some APIs, sandboxed UWP, ..). As you mentioned, you can use the Desktop Bridge to bring the app to the Windows 10 store as well with the downside of not running on mobile, HoloLens, Xbox (as of today). Then again, WPF doesn't run on those platforms either.
Write the app from scratch in UWP: run on Windows 10 on all available platforms. Yes, you will leave the Windows 7 users in the cold but not that Windows 7 is already in the extended support block so people will have to upgrade at some point.
Write the app from scratch with Xamarin.Forms, creating a single app that runs on Windows 7 (WPF), UWP, Android and iOS. Note that this is a somewhat different XAML dialect right now, but XAML Standard is working on unifying the dialects in the future.
A bit more work is to share most of your code with .NET Standard or PCL libraries and write multiple native UI's on top of it (which can be done with Xamarin).
If you're looking for longer term support pick either UWP (the way forward for Windows) or Xamarin.Forms.
Try Microsoft's Desktop Bridge tool for UWP. Using the Desktop Bridge, you can gradually migrate your code to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to reach every Windows 10 device, including phones, Xbox One, and HoloLens
Using Desktop bridge tool, you can
Convert MSI to APPX package
Upload your Desktop app (after conversion to APPX package) to Store
Take advantage of UWP features like Live tiles, Push Notification and many more)
And, for Android and iOS app try Xamarin. UWP project cannot converted to xamarin project. You've to write seperate project. I recommend you to try Xamarin.Forms which allows you to boild UWP, Android and iOS app with shared code.
I have a need to create a desktop application that can run on Windows machines (Windows 7, 8, 10 and Windows Server). I understand I can use Classic WPF, but prefer to use Xamarin Forms.
Does XF support Windows Desktop apps? If so, are there any gotchas to be aware of?
The next release of Xamarin Forms, Xamarin Forms 3, is going to add full support for desktop apps on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The MacOS support is in preview now, but the Windows support is still in development.
As I understand it, the plan is to use WPF for the Windows support, so your solution would include a WPF project in addition to each of the other platform specific projects. That will allow development of traditional desktop Windows apps, rather than UWP type apps.
The hope/assumption here is that, because these are WPF apps they should therefore be able to run on versions of Windows that don't support UWP apps - Windows 7 and Server 2008 for example.
There's more on what's coming in Xamarin Forms 3 on the Xamarin Blog here, and also in the Microsoft Build 2017 talk by David Ortinau.
I was at a talk by Xamarin TSP Michael Sivers last night and he mentioned that there are discussions ongoing about a XAML standard that could be adopted by both Xamarin and WPF which makes a lot of sense in the context of Xamarin forms apps on WPF.
on Windows, Xamarin Forms supports UWP apps only.
Our team would like to develop an application in Visual studio and Xamarin. The app needs to be supported in both Mac and Windows. We prefer Xamarin because the back end code can be shared. If possible, how to build and publish it so that it can be only installed in the machines. We are not planning to submit this app to the corresponding app stores.
You can write and Windows Application with C# using WinForms, WPF, WinRT (Windows Store apps).
Also you can write Mac application with C# using Xamarin.Mac.
To share the code between Windows App and Mac App, you just need to split your code into shareable Business Logic (part) and specific UI part.
To share the code, just use PCL libraries.
Yes.
The core business logic can be written in shared code usable on both platforms.
You have a couple of choices of how to develop the UI. You can use native or Xamarin Forms.
If you use native then I would suggest using the MVVM pattern with a framework like MvvmCross. You can then write the bulk of your app in shared code and just write the UI in platform-specific code, with the windows UI written as a standard windows WPF or UWP app, and the Mac app written using Xamarin.Mac using the native Mac API.
If you want to use Forms then you may have to compile the binaries yourself to get Mac support as it won't be available till roughly May 2017, but you could get started building a Forms app for UWP/Windows now and add the Mac project once it is available.