Uno Platform 5.3 is now available, adding over 350 new improvements to the cross-platform .NET development tool.
According to the product team, the most notable change in this release is that JetBrains .NET IDE Rider is now officially supported. Previously, Rider could be used with Uno, but it required several setup steps to get started. Now the experience is more similar to what Visual Studio and VS Code developers experience.
“What this means in practice is that you can enjoy the full set of developer productivity enhancers such as C# and XAML Hot Reload for Uno Platform apps and debugging,” the Uno product team wrote in a blog post.
This release also features improvements to Hot Reload. There is a new visual indicator to better help developers monitor changes as they are coding, which displays new information whenever Hot Reload is triggered.
Another update is the addition of two new UI controls: ItemsView and SelectorBar. ItemsView displays a collection of items in a customizable layout. It supports dynamic item arrangements, smooth scrolling, and virtualization. SelectorBar is a UI component that allows users to select from a set of options.
Uno Platform 5.3 additionally features Open Sans as a new default font option to provide a more consistent look across targets. According to the product team, Segoe UI is the default font on WinUI, but that font isn’t available on macOS or Linux. Open Sans looks similar to Segoe UI and fits well with WinUI’s Fluent theme.
It also now supports variable fonts, which are fonts that contain multiple files and characteristics, such as weight, width, or italic, rather than a single file. This support was needed because Open Sans is a variable font. Because it can be hard to use multi-file fonts in WinUI, the team is also introducing the ability to use a font manifest to specify where single file fonts and multiple file fonts can be used.
Other features include simplified versioning, support for SkiaSharp 3 preview, removed support for .NET 7, and support for the .NET 9 preview.
More information is available in the release blog post.
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