Developing for the Universal Windows Platform? We’ve got you covered.

ctodx
14 October 2015

I’m proud to announce that today we officially released our suite of controls for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). For those who are ready to develop native Windows 10 apps, or even prepare for developing apps for the future UWP form factors and devices, we now have a full suite of controls that will help you fulfill your goals.

Examples of apps created with the DevExpress UWP suite

Much as Windows 10 is a multi-faceted progression from the ideas first seen in Windows 8, we decided to leverage the work we had put into our Windows 8 controls in order to produce this new UWP suite. Over the past few months, pretty much every control was reevaluated for the new run-time, ported, optimized, and tested in production. Apart from the grid control and data editors (of course, we couldn’t say we properly support this new platform without having our famous grid present and correct!), we’re providing data visualization controls such as charts, gauges, a photo gallery, and a map control; app navigation controls such as the tile bar, tiles, and radial menu, together with page layout control; a ribbon; a PDF viewer; and much more. Windows 10 apps that allow for data entry and visualization, together with dashboard-type facilities should now be a breeze to create.

For full details of the suite go to devexpress.com/Win10Apps.

During the design process for the new suite, we naturally came to the point where we had to make a decision about the Win8 XAML control suite from which this new product was evolved. From everything we’ve seen and heard during the launch of Windows 10, it became readily apparent that Windows 8 as a target platform was going to rapidly become irrelevant. Windows 10 is a simple (and free!) upgrade to Windows 8, especially for retail customers – all of the laptops I personally look after are all now on Windows 10 – that it just made sense to discontinue the Windows 8 XAML product in our future major releases. Consequently, it will not be part of v15.2 when we release in December, whereas the Windows 10 Apps control suite will be. If you are still having to maintain a Windows 8 XAML app, the suite will still remain as part of v15.1, but no new features will be added. Our efforts in this space are going to be directed to the new form factors for UWP, as well as providing new features and controls for it.

As usual, we’d love to hear your feedback about the new suite.

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The following free DevExpress product offers remain available. Should you have any questions about the free offers below, please submit a ticket via the DevExpress Support Center at your convenience. We’ll be happy to follow-up.
Fredrik
Fredrik

Nice but have to say when running the app it seems very slow. The CRM demo even has delays when opening a contact, the grid control demo delays here and there and feels very sluggish comapred to winforms. Is the new universal app platform inherently much slower and unfit for business apps or are your controls still in their infancy?

16 October 2015
Julian Bucknall (DevExpress)
Julian Bucknall (DevExpress)

Fredrik: The first thing I'd say is that performance comparisons between WinForms and anything XAML (WPF, Silverlight, UWP) will favor the former. After all, with WinForms we are going directly to the Windows graphics subsystems to display stuff, whereas with XAML we have to use the visual run-time with all that entails.

Nevertheless, the team would like to know some more information about your setup to see if there's something they can identify as an issue. Could you email me at julianb@devexpress.com please?

Cheers, Julian

16 October 2015
Steve Reilly
Steve Reilly

I am interested in porting my WPF app to UWP, but I require the TreeList control to carry out this port.  I am aware there was a general bias against tree views in Win8 ( Not Appropriate for Touch Applications !!! ); however, given that UWP is being touted as the future direction for both touch first and mouse/keyboard apps, surely this attitude towards the tree control is now obsolete, and we can have our hierarchies back?

Steve

5 November 2015

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