Windows 10: Fluent XAML Theme Editor Preview released for Windows Developers

Brink · Oct 10, 2018

We’re excited to announce the preview release of the Fluent XAML Theme Editor application!

As some of you may remember from our Build 2018 session this year, we previewed a tool using our new ColorPaletteResources API that allows you to set the color theme of your app through some simple color selections.

This tool is now publicly available to insiders and those running on pre-release builds (Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 17723 or newer) to test out on our GitHub repository!

How to use the Fluent XAML Theme Editor

With the preview build, you can select three major colors for both the Light and Dark themes in the right-hand properties view labeled “Color Dictionary”:

Region – The background that all the controls sit on, which is a separate resource that does not exist in our framework.

Base – Represents all our controls’ backplates and their temporary state visuals like hover or press. In general, Base should be in contrast with the background (or Region color) of your theme and with black text (if in Light theme) and white text (if in Dark theme).

Primary – This is essentially the Accent color and should contrast with mainly white text.

It is used in more choice locations to show alternate rest states for toggled controls like list selection, checkbox or radiobutton checked states, slider fill values, and other control parts that need to be shown as different from their default rest state once interacted with.

Refining the colors

In addition to the three major colors for each theme, you can also expand any one of the major colors to see a list of minor colors that change the color on certain controls on a more refined level.

In the above example, you’ll notice that although my major Base color is purple in Dark Theme, I can override that second gradient value to be yellow to change the borders and disabled color of controls.

To access the detailed view of colors, simply click the chevron next to the major color buttons:

Creating, saving and loading presets

The editor will ship with some presets for you to look at to get an idea of what a theme looks like in the app.

The preset dropdown is located at the top of the Color Dictionary properties panel.

When you first boot up it will always be set to Default – which is the Light and Dark theme styling default for all our controls. You can select different themes like Lavender and Nighttime to get an idea of how the tool will theme our controls.

Once you’re ready to start making your own theme, just start editing the colors! Once you’ve started tweaking them, you’ll notice that the Presets ComboBox goes from the name of the preset to “Custom”:

This means that you’ve started a new temporary theme that’s “Custom.” Any changes you make will not affect any of the other Presets in that box.

Once you’re satisfied with the changes you’ve made, simply click the “Save” button and browse to your desired save point.

Similarly, you can open your saved JSON theme by clicking the “Load” button and browsing to your saved theme’s file location.

Contrast Ratio Checking

Lastly, one of the most important parts of creating your theme needs to be making sure that in either respective theme you are contrast compliant. The tool provides you with a small list of contrast information on the left-hand side of the color selection window when choosing your color.

In this window you can see your contrast with the most prevalent text color in the theme that you’re choosing to edit, in the above case black text because you are editing a Light theme color value.

When you pick a color that falls below the standard contrast ratio of 4.5:1, you’ll be alerted with red text next to your contrast value.

You can learn more about contrast ratios and their importance here.

Exporting and using your theme in an app

Of course, once you’ve themed everything, you’ll want to use in your app! To do that you’ll need to click the “Export” button at the bottom of the Color Dictionary properties panel.

That button will open a popup window with a generic, unnamed ResourceDictionary stub (seen below).

This window doesn’t make anything final, however, if you want to make some changes to the theme and re-export them to the Export window, it will refresh with your changed colors.

Once you’re ready to use it in your app, click the “Copy to Clipboard” button in the lower right corner and go to UWP Visual Studio solution.

Once in Visual Studio, right-click on the project solution, located in the Solution Explorer.

And go to Add > New Item and then choose Resource Dictionary.

Name that dictionary whatever makes sense to you and click Add when you’re done.

That should generate a blank ResourceDictionary like this:

Now you can paste the exported theme code from the editor into that ResourceDictionary.

Now you have a fully customized color theme waiting to be use, so let’s apply it!

To do that, you’ll want to go into your page or app.xaml (depending on how much of your app you want the theme to apply to) and merge your theme dictionary into the resources of that page or app.

Lastly, don’t forget to set the background color of your page to the RegionColor that you picked for your theme. It’s the only brush that won’t get set automatically.

Once that’s in, you’re done! Your theme colors will now be pervasive across your app or page depending.

Scoping your theme

If instead you want to scope your theme colors to a smaller area, you can also put all that power into just a container (Like Grid or StackPanel) and the theme will scope to just the controls that live within that container:

Using your theme down-level

When you export your theme, you’ll see a ResourceDictionary markup with a ColorPaletteResources definition like this:

ColorPaletteResources is a friendly API for our SystemColors that sit within generic.xaml and allows for those SystemColors to be scoped at any level.

If you wanted to enable this same theme to work downlevel, you would have to define each SystemColor individually with each color from your theme:

In the above case we’re using the Lavender theme to show this down-level transition.

Warning: Although this markup format change will enable your theme to be applied across controls in earlier SDK versions, it will not work on a page, container or control scoped level. ColorPaletteResources is the API that allows scoping behavior. This markup format will only work at the app.xaml level for earlier SDKs.

Get started today

To use the Fluent XAML Theme Editor preview now, head on over to our GitHub repo for the app. There you can download the source to the app and get started with what it has to offer!
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Source: Fluent XAML Theme Editor Preview released! - Windows Developer Blog

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Brink · Oct 10, 2018

Windows UI Library Preview released for Windows 10

The Windows UI Library (or WinUI for short) is a new way to get and use Fluent controls and styles for building Windows 10 UWP apps: via NuGet packages.

The WinUI NuGet packages contain new and popular UWP XAML controls and features which are backward-compatible on a range of Windows 10 versions, from the latest insider flights down to the Anniversary Update (1607).

Benefits of the Windows UI Library

Previously, the UWP XAML app development framework was shipped and updated solely as part of Windows and the SDK. In order to get new features or fixes, you had to wait for a new version of Windows. And just as importantly, you had to wait for your users to update their OS as well.

Using the new WinUI NuGet package(s) has two main benefits for UWP XAML app developers:

It lets you start building and shipping apps with new UWP XAML features immediately: since the NuGet packages are backward-compatible with a wider range of Windows 10 versions, you no longer have to wait for your users to update their OS before they can run your app with the latest features.

It makes it simpler to build version adaptive apps: you usually won’t have to include version checks or conditional XAML markup to use controls or features in a WinUI package when you’re building an app that targets multiple versions of Windows 10.

Release Details

The Windows UI Library is built and maintained by the same engineering team responsible for the standard Windows 10 SDK, and follows the same development and testing process. However, shipping via NuGet gives our engineering team more flexibility in how we plan, release, and update the UWP XAML platform.

This initial release includes previews of the first two Windows UI packages:

Microsoft.UI.Xaml

Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Core.Direct

These are prerelease packages, similar to a Windows Insider SDK. A future release will include “RTM” versions of these packages, and may have additional features or breaking changes. The prerelease versions are fully functional for testing and evaluation purposes, but we recommend using the RTM versions for production apps.

Not all of the XAML platform is in WinUI. For future versions we’re evaluating moving more of the XAML platform to WinUI packages, and are also exploring options for moving our development process to an open source model on GitHub.

Until then, we look forward to hearing any issues or feedback you may have through the Feedback Hub or through the UWP UserVoice forum!

Getting Started

You can find more info on how to install and get started with the Windows UI Library preview in the documentation, which will be expanded in the coming weeks:

https://aka.ms/winui

The NuGet packages for WinUI can be found via the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio, or by visiting the package pages:

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.UI.Xaml

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Micro...ml.Core.Direct

The dev branch of the Xaml Controls Gallery sample app available in the Microsoft Store has also been updated to use WinUI as a usage example:

https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows...s/XamlUIBasics

Note that to use the Windows UI Library, your UWP project’s Min version must be 14393 or higher and the Target version must be 17134 or higher.

Windows UI Library Contents

1) Existing controls and features, with wider version support

The Microsoft.UI.Xaml package includes a number of controls that are also part of the standard Windows 10 SDK, plus Fluent design elements like Reveal highlighting and the Acrylic material.

For example, apps often use a TreeView control to display and navigate a hierarchical list. A new native UWP Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls.TreeView control was added to Windows 10 as part of the April 2018 Update (1803), which means end-users have to install the April 2018 Update before they can run apps that use it. And not every user may be running that version of Windows 10 yet, especially in enterprise environments which evaluate and roll out updates at a slower pace.

However with WinUI, TreeView is also available as a separate Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Controls.TreeView class which provides the same functionality as the default Windows 10 SDK, with added benefits:

It works on a wider range of previous Windows 10 versions

It includes new functionality which hasn’t been released in the standard SDK version yet

Apps can freely use both the default SDK version and the WinUI version of the same control. But you may as well use the WinUI version of a control when there’s one available since there’s little downside.

More info on the package contents is available in the documentation:

https://aka.ms/winui

2) New and preview controls

The Microsoft.UI.Xaml package also includes new controls that will likely be included in the standard SDK with a future release of Windows, like CommandBarFlyout and MenuBar.

Prerelease versions of the packages may additionally contain early prerelease features and controls. For example, this first prerelease version contains some controls like Repeater, Scroller, and LayoutPanel: these controls are functional, but we’re still working on them and so they likely won’t be included in the first upcoming RTM release of WinUI.

3) XamlDirect

The Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Core.Direct package is a preview of a new standalone WinRT library for middleware developers.

It provides lower level access to most of the XAML framework, enabling better CPU and working set performance for middleware components.

It is functional on the Windows April 2018 Update and previous versions of Windows 10, but will provide improved performance on current RS5 insider builds and upcoming versions of Windows 10!
Click to expand...

Source: Windows UI Library Preview released! - Windows Developer BlogWindows Developer Blog

pjo123 · Oct 10, 2018

Developers preview

I have been trying to find out how to upgrade to the windows 10 on my Nokia Lumia 1020 so I can finally have the ability to create folders on my start screen. I realize that the update has not been released to the general public and is in the preview stages.
I was also told I could register for "Preview for Developers" That being said no one has been able to guide me through these steps. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

btarunr · Oct 10, 2018

Apple Posts OS X "Mountain Lion" Developer Preview 3

Apple released the third developer preview of its OS X "Mountain Lion" operating system for Macs and Macbooks. The Developer Preview 3 (Build 12A178q) was released to members of the Mac Developer Program. While a change-log is not listed, a number of new known issues with the build were listed, which Apple, along with its MDP partners are working on. OS X "Mountain Lion" is Apple's next major operating system for Macs, Macbooks, Mac Pro, and Mac Servers. It is slated for late Summer, 2012.

Source: MacRumors

Windows 10: Fluent XAML Theme Editor Preview released for Windows Developers

Fluent XAML Theme Editor Preview released for Windows Developers

Fluent XAML Theme Editor Preview released for Windows Developers

Fluent XAML Theme Editor Preview released for Windows Developers

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