The team behind the open-source Uno Platform has announced the release of Uno Platform 5.0, which it says includes several updates for productivity. “Five is for 5X productivity,” the release blog post is titled.
The Uno Platform is a platform for building multi-platform .NET apps from a single codebase.
In the 5.0 release, support for C# Markup has been added. According to the project maintainers, C# Markup was desired by programmers because it allows them to build a full application from just that language. “A massive bit of feedback from the community has been the need to learn multiple languages to build an Uno Platform application,” the Uno Platform Team explained in a blog post.
C# Markup supports standard WinUI, Uno.Toolkit, and Uno.Extensions controls, or developers can use the C# Markup support generator to use any third-party control. It also comes packaged with capabilities like data binding, styles, resources, templates, and visual states.
Another benefit is that the language allows app UIs to be created declaratively and have a clear separation between the UI and the underlying business logic.
The Uno Platform Team also released a Figma to C# Markup plugin, which is inspired by the Figma-to-XAML plugin.
Several updates were made to the MVUX extension, which implements the Model-View-Update design pattern. It now takes better advantage of Hot Reload, which is a capability that allows developers to update code and run it without needing to pause and rebuild the app. Now, Model and View can be altered without the applications needing to be restarted.
The team also created a course for learning about Hot Reload. The hands-on workshop guides developers through building a simple calculator that takes advantage of this feature. It also created another workshop that teaches how to build an app for streaming YouTube videos that can be deployed across multiple platforms, which also highlights the benefits of MVUX.
Other improvements in Uno Platform 5.0 include MP4 camera capture for iOS, improved composition support for Skia targets, improved DPI scaling and theming support for GTK, and more.
