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