Windows 10: WhatsApp Desktop gets a native UWP version on Windows; macOS app in the works

GHacks · Aug 17, 2022

The WhatsApp Desktop app for Windows has been updated, it is now a native UWP app. It replaces the old web-app version.

The messaging service, owned by Meta, released a beta version of the UWP app in November last year. You can read more about it here.

What's new in WhatsApp Desktop

The app is faster, and you can tell it right from the get-go. That's basically because it is not an Electron app anymore. The performance improvements are welcome, as are the notification badges. Speaking of which, notifications arrive instantly in the new app, and you don't need the program running in the background either. The interface of WhatsApp Desktop has been revamped, it now resembles a native Windows 10 program. The app has a light theme and a dark theme that you can switch to from the Settings.

The old version of the messaging app would only work if your phone was online, it was a requirement to synchronize your chats between the devices. This limitation was also true for the WhatsApp Web version that is accessible via web browsers. The new WhatsApp Desktop app is a proper standalone program, it no longer requires your phone to be connected to the internet, in other words it supports multiple devices just like its rival, Telegram. Your chats are still end-to-end encrypted, which is a good thing.

Note: There is a device limit, you can use WhatsApp on up to 4 linked devices and a phone at the same time.

Download the WhatsApp Desktop app from the Microsoft Store. It requires Windows 10 14316.0 or higher. New users will need to scan a QR code using WhatsApp on your phone, to sign in on your PC. If you already have the Electron app installed on your computer, it will be upgraded to the UWP version. You can use it alongside the beta version, but you may want to disable notifications in one of the apps, otherwise you will be bombarded with double notifications for every message that you receive.

WhatsApp for macOS

WhatsApp states that a native app for macOS is in development. If you have a Mac, you can opt in to the Testflight program to participate in the beta. Unfortunately, the slots in the beta are full already, so you may have to wait for a while to try it.

I've been using the regular beta app for a few months on my MacBook, it's based on Electron (web-based) and looks similar to the Windows version, except for some visual elements such as the colors and button styles. Its performance, however, is quite poor, it's slow to open, and there is a delay while messages are synced between devices, and notifications don't arrive immediately.

WABetaInfo says that the new WhatsApp macOS beta version is built on Catalyst technology, which means the app is actually a port of the iPad version. So, we can expect it to offer better performance while using fewer resources. The app has a refreshed design that introduces a new sidebar to quickly access Chats, Calls, Archived Chats, Starred Messages, etc.

Do you use WhatsApp on your computer?

Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post WhatsApp Desktop gets a native UWP version on Windows; macOS app in the works appeared first on gHacks Technology News.

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Brink · Aug 17, 2022

Bringing your existing desktop apps to UWP

At Build 2016, we showed you how to use the Desktop App Converter to bring your existing desktop applications to the universal .appx packaging format as a first step to bringing your application to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Once on UWP, your apps are easier for users to manage and install, and you can integrate engaging UWP functionality and reach customers across the Windows 10 platform, including on IoT devices, Xbox One and HoloLens. We’d like to take this opportunity to further provide some context about the converter and other tooling involved (previously part of Project “Centennial”), and help you get started with the Desktop Bridge.

Since the release of the initial preview in early April, we’ve already seen hundreds of apps being converted and deployed for early testing. With the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342, you can now run the Desktop App Converter on the Professional version of Windows, alongside the Enterprise edition that was previously enabled. Now is a great time to get started with converting your existing desktop applications to bring them to UWP!

What is the Desktop Bridge?

The Desktop Bridge brings a number of important improvements to the Windows platform for all developers. First, you can convert existing Windows desktop apps or games to .appx packages, so your users will be able to install them easily and experience seamless updates, be it through the Windows Store or any distribution channel of your choice.

Once converted to the UWP application model, the desktop app has access to new UWP APIs, including Live Tiles, push notifications and local/roaming app data, which previously were inaccessible to desktop apps. With this conversion process, your existing code continues to run with minimal changes and UWP deployment ensures that whatever state the app writes to the PC is isolated and easily cleaned up on uninstall – addressing a major pain point users have had with desktop apps in the past. Additionally, the app can now expose App Services, run Background Tasks, and have a XAML UI by adding a UWP app container process to the same app package.

With your existing code now running in the UWP application model, it’s straightforward to add additional functionality over time, gradually migrating existing Win32/.NET code to move functionality into the app container. Running your code in the app container benefits the security of your user’s machine, and at the end of the migration results in a UWP app that can run on PCs, Phones, IoT devices, Xbox One and HoloLens.

Convert – Create an .appx deployment package for your desktop application

Enhance – Call new UWP APIs from your desktop application

Extend – Add new functionality, such as UWP App Services and Background Tasks

Migrate – Move more code into the app container part of your package, such as a XAML UI frontend

Expand – Finish the migration of all code to the app container and expand your reach to all Windows devices

Getting Started

To get started, you need the current Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342 (or higher), and the Windows 10 Anniversary SDK Preview Build 14332 (or higher). Please keep this installation separate from your production environment, as this build does not output valid app package for Store deployment. Next you’ll need the latest Desktop App Converter to complete your development environment. This tool converts your desktop app installer (such as MSI) to an .appx package that can be deployed to a Windows 10 Anniversary Edition desktop. If you’re trialing Visual Studio “15” Preview 2, you can also take a look at the packaging and debug support for projects that are using the Desktop Bridge. For more information, please read the Visual Studio blog post on Visual Studio “15” support with the Desktop Bridge.

If your desktop application does not have an installer (e.g. deployment just consists of file copy operations), or you want to explore the Desktop Bridge with a simple example first, you can check out our sample repo on GitHub. Using the Basic Desktop Bridge App sample as a template, you can replace the sample .exe with your binaries, adjust the respective entries in the manifest according to the documentation and you are done with the conversion. You don’t even need to install and run the Desktop App Converter for this type of project!

Test, Update, Enhance and Extend your converted app

Once you have successfully converted your desktop app (either with the Desktop App Converter or manually), you are ready to deploy, test and enhance your app. Now that your app is in the UWP app model and has an .appx package, the methods for doing this are the same as for any UWP app. Check out our Deploy and Debug documentation for detailed steps on side-loading and debugging. Note that your converted app may need some code changes in some cases. Be sure to read the Preparing Your Desktop App for Conversion to UWP topic on the Windows Dev Center.

You can now iterate on your code and start enhancing your app with exciting new UWP features that were previously not available to desktop apps. Add background tasks and app services. Add a UWP process to your package to host a UWP XAML UI frontend, and so much more. We will continue to update the Desktop Bridge sample repo on GitHub to demonstrate many of these great UWP features consumed by converted desktop applications, as we are getting closer to the final release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more in-depth information about these approaches, what the end-to-end developer process looks like and how to add new functionality to your existing app.

Help us improve the bridge

The Desktop Bridge offers an exciting path to migrate your existing desktop apps to UWP. It enables you to gradually move across the bridge at your own pace while keeping your existing code investments running at all times along the way.

As you explore the tools on current preview builds, we’re very keen on hearing about your experiences and receiving your feedback. The best place to make feature suggestions is on the Windows Developer UserVoice site. For questions and bug reports, please head over to the Developing Universal Windows apps forums.

Additional resources

Desktop conversion for UWP apps on Dev Center

Build 2016 breakout session – Bringing Existing Desktop Applications to the Universal Windows Platform by John Sheehan, Peyman Zanjani

Build 2016 pre-record session – Bringing Desktop Apps to the UWP Using Desktop App Converter by David Tepper, Avneet Singh

Channel 9 Live interview – John Sheehan, David Tepper, Stefan Wick

Written by Stefan Wick, Principal Program Manager Lead for the Desktop Bridge
Click to expand...

Source: Bringing your existing desktop apps to UWP | Building Apps for Windows

Brink · Aug 17, 2022

The path from a desktop app to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app

Last month, we provided an overview of the Desktop Bridge in this blog post. We are excited to announce that since then we’ve released a new version of the desktop app converter, adding support for great new features and fixing several issues to provide a more stable environment. To learn more about the improvements in the Desktop App Converter, please visit Get $Desktop App Converter from the Microsoft Store.

Today, we will follow up with a walkthrough of a concrete coding example that takes an existing desktop app and gradually migrates and enhances it with the Desktop Bridge into a full Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app that can run on all Windows 10 devices—such as Xbox One, HoloLens, phones, et cetera—and take full advantage of the platform.
Our starting point is a simple Windows Forms app that keeps track of the user’s status by storing it in the registry. Essentially, we start with this:

[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4[/td] [td]private void cmbBox_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { MyRegKey.SetValue("Status", cmbBox.SelectedItem); }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

The code for this sample app, as well as the code for each of the steps along the journey across the bridge, can be found in our sample repo on GitHub. As we gradually migrate our app, it remains fully functional every step of the way and picks up additional features that will help keep users engaged.

Step 1: Convert

As a first step to get our app on the bridge, we take it through the conversion process. There are a couple of options to do this initial step. For a simple app like this, which gets installed just by copying binaries, we can quickly perform a manual conversion as explained in this article on Dev Center and demonstrated in this sample on GitHub. Apps that are using a .MSI (or similar) installer should use the Desktop App Converter for the conversion process. Finally, there are several third party install tool providers who are in the process of adding support for the Desktop Bridge to UWP in their products, as well, such as Advanced Installer, FireGiant and InstallShield.

Once the conversion is complete, we want to test, adjust, and enhance our application in Visual Studio. For that, we can take advantage of the project type for UWP packaging, which the Visual Studio team recently introduced for Visual Studio 15 Preview 2 (see this post for details and instructions).

Now we can hit F5 and debug our application running within the UWP app model. With the conversion, a number of immediate platform benefits become available automatically, such as Start menu integration, clean install/update/uninstall, and distribution of the .appx package via your choice of distribution.

Step 2: Enhance

Now that we have brought our app into the UWP app model, an app identity (as specified in the appxmanifest.xml file) is added, which enables our app to call UWP APIs that were not available to our desktop application before. Let’s look at an example of how to add a Live Tile to our app. The goal is to update the tile on the Start menu whenever the user’s status changes:

[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17[/td] [td]private void comboBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { MyRegKey.SetValue("Status", comboBox1.SelectedItem); // Update the apps live tile XmlDocument tileXml = TileUpdateManager.GetTemplateContent(TileTemplateType.TileSquare150x150Text03); XmlNodeList textNodes = tileXml.GetElementsByTagName("text"); textNodes[0].InnerText = "MyDesktopApp"; textNodes[1].InnerText = "Status: "; textNodes[2].InnerText = comboBox1.SelectedItem.ToString(); textNodes[3].InnerText = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); TileNotification tileNotification = new TileNotification(tileXml); TileUpdateManager.CreateTileUpdaterForApplication().Update(tileNotification); }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Step 3: Extend

In addition to calling more UWP APIs, we can now also add UWP components to our app package to take advantage of other exciting UWP features. Examples of this include adding App Services, becoming a sharing target or a file picker, or adding background tasks.

With background tasks, an app can respond to triggers to execute code even when the app is not running—even if the device is in connected stand-by mode. This way, you can always keep your app up to date and create an experience of an app that is always alive. To illustrate this in our example, we want to use the TimeTrigger to periodically check the status and notify the user via a toast notification:

Now that your Winforms app has identity and runs in the UWP app model. You can declare background tasks in your manifest and register them from your code the same way a UWP can do today:
[table][tr][td]1[/td] [td]RegisterBackgroundTask("Timer", new TimeTrigger(15, false));[/td] [/tr] [/table]

When the TimeTrigger fires, the system will invoke your registered background task in a UWP app container process and you can run code even if your app is not currently running:
[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4 5 6 7[/td] [td]public sealed class BgTask : IBackgroundTask { public void Run(IBackgroundTaskInstance taskInstance) { ShowToast("Status: " + currentStatus); } }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Step 4: Migrate

To take advantage of UWP UI features such as a touch-friendly UI and smooth animations, let’s migrate the user experience of our project to a XAML front-end. In practice, the details of the UI migration depend on the Win32 UI framework your app has been using and the complexity of your UI. In this simple example, the changes are straightforward. In most real apps, however, this step will require more developer resources.

At this time, we can delete our now obsolete Windows Forms related UI code. However, we still want to keep around our desktop app process for our existing business logic (i.e. managing the app’s state via registry). To communicate between the two processes, we are using an App Service as communication pipeline.

[table][tr][td]1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10[/td] [td]private async void cmbBox_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e) { ValueSet valueSet = new ValueSet(); valueSet.Add("StatusUpdate", cmbBox.SelectedItem.ToString()); if (App.Connection != null) { AppServiceResponse response = await App.Connection.SendMessageAsync(valueSet); }[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Step 5: Expand

In the final step, we will now expand the reach of our application to all Windows 10 devices that run UWP apps by moving the last remaining pieces of code into the UWP app container process. To do so, we will replace the registry-based state with the UWP-compliant ApplicationData API. Thus, we can now deploy our app to phones, Xbox One, HoloLens and other Windows devices that run UWP apps.

Conclusion

The Desktop Bridge offers an exciting path to migrate your existing desktop apps to UWP. It enables you to gradually move across the bridge at your own pace while keeping your existing code investments running at all times along the way.

As you explore the tools on current preview builds, we’re very keen to hear your experiences and feedback. The best place to make feature suggestions is on the Windows Developer UserVoice site. For questions and bug reports, please head over to the Developing Universal Windows apps forums.
Click to expand...

Source: The path from a desktop app to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app | Building Apps for Windows

RazvanSilaghi · Aug 17, 2022

Camera doesn't work on Skype UWP app but it does on the desktop version

Hi!

I have some problems with the Skype UWP app, it can't recongize my camera, as it does the Desktop Version, I really don't know what to do, I know that my camera doesn't officialy support Windows 10 nor Windows 8.1, but then why does it work on desktop programs?
The Windows Camera app doesn't recognize my camera aswell, nor Microsoft Edge, what can I do?

Windows 10: WhatsApp Desktop gets a native UWP version on Windows; macOS app in the works

WhatsApp Desktop gets a native UWP version on Windows; macOS app in the works

WhatsApp Desktop gets a native UWP version on Windows; macOS app in the works

WhatsApp Desktop gets a native UWP version on Windows; macOS app in the works

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