Awesome
C# Markup 2
Concise next-gen C# Markup for .NET UI frameworks
C# Markup 2 for Uno Platform
C# Markup 2 supports multiple UI frameworks, including the excellent Uno Platform.
If you don't know Uno, I recommend you check them out; Uno is one of the best and most mature .NET UI frameworks, it offers an impressive breadth of features that will have your back when you need to create real-world production apps end2end, fast.
Quick play-around
dotnet new install Uno.Templates
dotnet new install Modern.CSharp.Templates
md UnoCSharpMarkup2
cd UnoCSharpMarkup2
dotnet new unoapp -preset recommended
dotnet new mcs-uno-markup2 --presentation mvux --allow-scripts yes
Markup options at a glance - good for everyone!
Uno Platform supports XAML but recently has embraced C# UI as well with Uno C# Markup. C# Markup 2 adds another option that goes above and beyond what gen-1 C# Markup variants offer.
It's good to have options - everyone wins: devs get the experience that they like best, and the UI framework gains more adoption. Check it out and pick what you like!
As a first impression, here's a quick side-by-side comparison:
Enjoy a Flutter-like UI development experience with C# Markup 2:
- Build .NET applications fully in C#
- Unclutter your markup - while reading and writing.<br />
- C# Markup 2 goes above and beyond gen 1 C# Markup approaches (e.g. Maui or Uno) to eliminate a lot of verbosity: no more endless repetitions of
new
,HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Center
,() =>
ornameof()
, no more specifying for each and everyTextBlock
binding that yes, you want to bind to theText
property... - Separated markup namespaces eliminate intellisense pollution, allow quick discovery and encourage clean separation of markup and logic: no more intellisense lists where you have to search in a sea of irrelevant options for the few that you are interested in. See only Markup API's while editing
MyPage.cs
, see UI framework and other API's while editingMyPage.logic.cs
.
- C# Markup 2 goes above and beyond gen 1 C# Markup approaches (e.g. Maui or Uno) to eliminate a lot of verbosity: no more endless repetitions of
- Target browsers and native desktop / mobile
- Use existing UI frameworks. Mature or bleeding edge is your choice: WPF, WinUI 3 for Windows App SDK and Uno Platform. Coming: AvaloniaUI, Maui, possibly Blazor.
- Use the built-in MVVM support - or any other update model that supports your UI framework (e.g. Uno's MVUX or ReactiveUI)
- Use for part or all of your application UI
- Designed to handle large UI fast: practically allocation-free, no reflection, efficient C#
No XAML / HTML / JavaScript / CSS required. No engine or layers to get in your way.
NuGet<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
Chat (if needed, join DotNetEvolution first)<br /> <br /> The best place to ask questions or help!
Getting Started
- Uno Platform / WinUI 3: Getting started with C# Markup 2 for WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK / Uno Platform
- WPF: Getting started with C# Markup 2 for WPF
Looking for C# Markup 1? Find it here
News
May 7, 2024
New C# Markup 2.4 for Uno Platform 5.2 incl .NET Single Project
Today's release is fully updated to Updated to Uno 5.2 including Uno's .NET Single Project and uno.sdk
!
Plus:
- Added support for latest
dotnet new unoapp
template - Updated to Uno.Extensions.* 4.1
- Updated to Microsoft.WindowsAppSDK 1.5
Dec 21, 2023
New C# Markup 2 templates for Uno Platform 5
In addition to some new C# Markup 2 methods, today's release adds support for the new C# Markup 2 templates for Uno Platform 5: an updated mcs-uno-markup2
template, and a new mcs-uno-view
template.
- Enjoy improved frictionless startup for both existing and new Uno solutions - whether created with Uno's
dotnet new unoapp
template or with the Uno solution wizard for Visual Studio - Full support for .NET 8 / .NET 7, as well as model types MVUX / MVVM / none
- The new
mcs-uno-view
template is used by the convenientNew-View.ps1
script, which is included inmcs-uno-markup2
- Templates are now pre-structured in accordance with best practices for maintainability and code reuse of C# Markup 2 UI.
Nov 18, 2023
2.3 Release is GA - adds support for .NET 8, Uno 5 plus 5 Uno Libraries!
This release is fully updated to the awesome Uno 5 release and .NET 8 GA. You can use the Uno Solution Wizard for Visual Studio and add a C# Markup 2 project to it at any time with one command. All Uno wizard customizations are supported: combine C# Markup 2 with MVUX or MVVM, XAML or Uno C# Markup, use Uno Navigation extensions, and target .NET 8 or .NET 7. All Uno target platforms are supported.
A brand new dotnet new C# Markup 2 project template gets you going in no time - carefully optimized for an optimal developer experience: uncluttered solution explorer view, automatic file grouping of markup and logic files, uncluttered markup source, focused intellisense, clear starting points for markup extensions in your code, plus fast hot reload - both automatic and with a hot reload button overlay in debug mode, for the platforms that your IDE can hot reload but cannot (yet) update the UI automatically.
Enjoy general C# Markup 2 improvements, plus C# Markup 2 API's for 5 additional Uno libraries:
- Support for Uno's UI Toolkit, Reactive / MVUX extension and Navigation extensions
- Support for the awesome LiveCharts2
- All
ThemeResource
s searchable in C# intellisense, strongly typed
The getting started is fully up to date. Examples in this repo and this readme will be updated soon to show off the new features.
NJoy concise C# Markup!
Nov 1, 2023
2.3 Preview Release adds 5 Uno Libraries!
Enjoy general C# Markup 2 improvements, plus C# Markup 2 API's for 5 additional Uno libraries:
- Support for Uno's UI toolkit, Reactive and Navigation extensions
- Support for the awesome LiveCharts2
- All
ThemeResource
s searchable in C# intellisense, strongly typed - Automatic UI update on C# hot reload
- A development tools overlay
You can try this today - see the NuGets listed above. Documentation of the new features plus a new getting started guide is coming with the next release - soon!
June 27, 2023
2.2 Release & start of .NET MAUI support
- Release 2.2 is out! Enjoy this polished release for Windows App SDK, Uno Platform and WPF.
- As the poll results indicated, C# Markup 2 support for .NET MAUI is most wanted.<br /> Implementation has started!
March 25, 2023
Poll results are in! And the winner is...
The March 2023 poll results on what to build next for C# Markup 2 are in!
A surprise addition was the ask for C# Markup 2 for Avalonia UI in the replies; it got a big response that catapulted it into a very close 2nd place.
Here are the results for the poll including the likes for "Other" options Blazor and AvaloniaUI:
And the winner is: C# Markup 2 for MAUI!<br /> Watch and star this repo to catch the release; you can also watch #CSharpForMarkup tweets for progress. Thanks for your response!
Feb 28, 2023
Major Release - C# Markup 2 version 2.0 for WinUI 3!
C# Markup 2 version 2.0 for WinUI 3 is here! Completely updated to .NET 7, C# 11 and the latest Windows App SDK and Uno Platform. With many improvements including 6 supported target platforms, C# hot reload support and dotnet new project templates.
Brought to you by Applicita
Special thanks go to Applicita for making this release possible; it's inspiring to see a company support OSS in this way (Applicita also open-sourced several other useful libraries)
More on what's new in this release here.
Feb 16, 2023
A new release of C# Markup 2 for WinUI 3 and Uno Platform is coming in Feb 2023
Updated to .NET 7, C# 11 and the latest Windows App SDK and Uno Platform. With many improvements - including C# hot reload support and a dotnet new project template. Watch this space!
April 14, 2022
New 0.8 release: adds
ControlTemplate
support andStyle
improvements!
See here and here for the full list of improvements
February 15, 2022
New 0.6 release: adds WPF and many improvements!
See here for the full list of improvements
November 30, 2021
C# Markup 2 announced at UNOCONF 2021!
This first preview targets WinUI 3 and Uno Platform - including browser webassembly - with C# 10 and .NET 6. It supports .NET Hot Reload for a fast inner dev loop.
Getting started for WPF
- Clone this repo
- Open CSharpMarkup.Wpf.Examples.sln and explore the source for the example pages. Note how page markup and page logic are separated in partial class files, and integrated with
Build()
,Assign()
andInvoke()
. - .NET Hot Reload is supported; edit and save the page markup in VS 2022 while debugging to see instant updates
- To learn how to use C# Markup 2, read the features description below and experiment in the example app
- To build your own app, reference from a .NET 6 WPF project and create the C# Markup UI windows, pages etc in that project. Note that for existing apps you can reference (WPF / class library) projects that target older .NET versions from the .NET 6 project, so you can add C# Markup UI to your app without having to migrate existing logic and/or WPF UI to .NET 6 and C# 10.
Getting started for WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK / Uno Platform
-
First check if your development environment is ready:
-
Either choose an existing Uno Platform 5.2 solution, or create a new one with the Uno Platform Template Wizard or the dotnet new unoapp template. Feel free to select any options; C# Markup 2 fully supports Uno 5.2 with .NET 8 or .NET 7, MVUX or MVVM, XAML or Uno C# Markup, on all target platforms.
-
Install the latest Modern.CSharp.Templates for
dotnet new
to get these templates for Windows App SDK, Uno Platform and moredotnet new install Modern.CSharp.Templates
To see help about the template parameters:
dotnet new mcs-uno-markup2 -h
-
Add a C# Markup 2 project to the Uno Platform solution, e.g.:
cd C:\Repos\UnoApp1 dotnet new mcs-uno-markup2 --appRootNamespace InnoWvate.UnoApp1 --presentation mvux --allow-scripts Yes
This will:
-
Add a new project
UnoApp1.Presentation
to the solution, with a working example:- Pages
- Models of the specified type (in above example MVUX)
- Navigation
- A
New-View.ps1
script to quickly add more pages and models - A
Readme.md
with instructions on how to get started quickly
The Presentation project is pre-structured for maintainability in accordance with best practices for C# Markup UI
-
Add NuGet package references to the Presentation project
-
Add a reference to the Presentation project in the
UnoApp1
project
Note that you can use the
--name
parameter ofdotnet new
to specify the name of your existing Uno project, if that differs from the solution folder name (in above example,UnoApp1
). The specified name will be used with the.Presentation
suffix for the new project as well. -
-
Open or reload the Uno solution and follow the steps in the
Readme.md
of the Presentation project to get started.
To learn how to use C# Markup 2, read the features description below.
Fore a more complete example, see the example app in this repo.
Features
C# Markup 2 contains a full declarative, fluent API for existing UI frameworks. It surfaces virtually every layout, view and property, including attached properties, and includes full inline documentation that links each markup helper / parameter to the inline documentation for the underlying UI object / property.
The rich UI frameworks that C# Markup 2 surfaces can contain as much as 500+ UI object types. E.g. layouts, views and styles, but also brushes, rich text elements, drawing primitives, transformations, animations, visual states and more. In addition C# Markup offers powerful and concise convenience API's for layout, bindings, convertors, templates and more.
- When targeting Windows Desktop, the WinUI API from the Windows App SDK is surfaced (without any dependency on Uno Platform).
- When targeting Uno Platform, the Uno.WinUI API is surfaced (atm only webassembly is tested, but any Uno target platform that can support .NET 6 and C# 10 should work)
- When targeting WPF, the WPF API is surfaced.
Basic markup anatomy
Layouts, views, properties and property values look like this:<br /> <br /> All properties can be set with extension methods: properties defined on the view type or it's base types, as well as attached properties.
Properties that are defined directly on the view type can alternatively be set with named parameters:<br /> <br /> This is mainly useful for properties that take primitive types.
Properties that take enum values have extension methods so the enum name does not have to be repeated<br />(as in TextAlignment: TextAlignment.Center
):<br />
Attached property names are prefixed with the defining type plus underscore:<br />
You can set multiple attached property values for the same defining type in one call:<br />
In addition to this, there are convenience overloads for some view types with just the most commonly used parameters:<br />
Property value converters
Implicit converters are provided in the to
subnamespace for common property value types:<br />
These are:
- All converters that accept
string
values, as specified by the UI framework with the TypeConverter attribute<br /> Note that WinUI 3 Desktop does not use this attribute, but Uno Platform and WPF do. - Additional manual converters that also accept other types than
string
, including tuples if more than one value is expected. E.g.:<br /> <br /> Allows you to specify:<br />Button() .CornerRadius (2.5)
or<br />Button() .CornerRadius ((2.5, 0, 2.5, 0))
An example using to.Point
:
Button() .Background (RadialGradientBrush (Center: (50, 50), GradientOrigin: (100, 50)))
An example using to.TimeSpan
and to.Duration
:
ColorAnimation (BeginTime: "0:0:5", Duration: 2.5)
In many cases the inline documentation on the to.
type describes the supported values and formatting; especially for strings this can avoid guesswork.
Styles
Styles can be assigned like this:<br />
And defined like this:<br />
In WPF you can bind a style setter value (WinUI 3 does not support this):<br />
Templates
A DataTemplate
is passed in as a Func<UIElement>
:<br />
A ControlTemplate
can be created like this:<br />
- The
.BindTemplate()
method lets you bind template properties to the templated parent - The
targetType
parameter is optional b
here is a null-valuedstatic UI_Button
field. In this example it only serves to demonstrate one way to get intellisense when editing binding expressions for aButton
; see Binding power for details.
Here is how you can use a ControlTemplate
in an implicit or explicit Style
:<br />
Enums for Grid rows and columns
You can use enums instead of numbers for Grid rows and colums. This improves readability and saves you from manually renumbering rows and columns when adding/removing/reordering them<br />
Shorthand helpers
Shorthand helpers are included as an alternative to common combinations of markup helpers:
Insert layout children: conditional and Spread
All layouts ignore null
values in their children
; this makes it possible to have conditional views depending on the value of an expression at page (re) build time.
The Spread
helper allows to insert a variable number of children at a specific position in the children
list (similar to what Flutter offers).
Binding power
Thanks to the C# 10 CallerArgumentExpression attribute, you don't have to use strings or nameof()
to specify binding paths with good performance. Instead you can use C# expressions and enjoy all the goodness that they bring: full intellisense, compiler checked, renaming support :<br />
Note from the intellisense description in above image that the pathExpression
parameter supports several convenience binding syntaxes, which allows to:
- Identify the viewmodel part of the expression with parenthesis:<br />
path expression =
viewmodel.path
||(viewmodel expression).path
, wherepath
can contain.
e.g.:.Bind (vm.SelectedTweet)
binds to "SelectedTweet".Bind ((vm.SelectedTweet).Title)
binds to "Title".Bind ((vm.SelectedTweet).Author.Name)
binds to "Author.Name"
- Use
?
with null-valued type instances to enjoy C# goodness without needing object instances e.g.:.Bind (vm?.SelectedTweet?.Title)
binds to "Title"<br /> Note that using?
can be necessary because the expression will be evaluated at runtime, even though we don't care about it's value; the CallerArgumentExpression attribute supplies an expression string in addition to the expression value.
- You can still pass in string literals
.Bind ("SelectedTweet")
binds to "SelectedTweet"
Any surrounding "
, @
or whitespace characters in pathExpression
are ignored
Bind
supports almost all functionality that the UI framework offers for binding. In addition, there are many Bind
overloads that allows to:
- Omit the property name to bind to the default property of a view type:<br />
- Bind with inline conversion:<br />
- Bind a command and it's parameter in one go:<br />
Page anatomy - separate markup and UI logic
A typical markup page starts like this:
FlutterPage.cs
:
using CSharpMarkup.<UI framework name>;
using static CSharpMarkup.<UI framework name>.Helpers;
namespace Examples;
partial class FlutterPage
{
public void Build() => Content =
Note the use of partial class
; this lets you separate the UI markup from UI logic:
FlutterPage.logic.cs
:
using <UI framework namespace>.Controls;
namespace Examples;
public sealed partial class FlutterPage : Page, IBuild
{
readonly FlutterViewModel vm;
public FlutterPage()
{
InitializeComponent(); // Only needed for WinUI
DataContext = vm = <obtain viewmodel instance>;
Build();
Namespace separation of markup and UI logic
IMPORTANT:<br />
-
In C# markup files like
<page>.cs
:<br /> IncludeCSharpMarkup.*
namespace usings but no UI objectmodel usings such asusing Microsoft.UI.Xaml;
<br /><br /> (by design the type names in the CSharpMarkup namespace are identical to the type names in the UI objectmodel, so including both would cause ambiguities)<br /><br /> Try to limit using the UI object model to UI logic files. If you must, you can use the UI objectmodel safely in C# markup files; a good practice then is to define global namespace using aliases, e.g.global using UI = Microsoft.UI;
<br /><br /> For more guidance, see the comments in theGlobalUsings.cs
of a project created withdotnet new mcs-uno-markup2
. -
In UI logic files like
<page>.logic.cs
:<br /> Do not useCSharpMarkup
objects<br /><br /> Markup object instances are not safe to use outside of a markup expression (due to performance features - each markup object type has a single static instance to prevent allocating an extra object for each view). That is whyAssign
andInvoke
(see below) pass the UI object contained in the markup object to the logic, instead of the markup object itself.
Integrate UI markup with UI logic
With Assign
and Invoke
you can integrate UI markup with UI logic:
SearchPage.cs
:<br />
SearchPage.logic.cs
:<br />
SearchPage.cs
:<br />
SearchPage.logic.cs
:<br />
Note:<br /> In
SearchPage.cs
,StackPanel
andTextBox
are markup object types, while<br /> inSearchPage.logic.cs
they are the corresponding UI framework object types
Development workflow tips
Improve markup colorization in Visual Studio
There is no C# Markup IDE extension (yet...) to properly colorize markup, however C# Markup readability can be improved with this workaround in Visual Studio options:
Under Fonts and Colors
, copy the color of User Types - Classes
to User Members - Methods
(with the Custom...
button). Now the markup color for views and properties will no longer be the same.