WPF Platform Support

[inforithmics]

Currently Xamarin.Essentials Supports iOS, Android and UWP when I use WPF the .Net Standard version is taken where nothing is implemented.
So my question is it planned to Support WPF as a new target?

VS bug #735666

[jamesmontemagno]

Xamarin.Essentials is focused currently on iOS, Android, and UWP for our first release and additional platforms will be considered in the future, but not currently on the roadmap.

[prashantvc]

@inforithmics as James mentioned above, the focus right now is to make it easy for mobile devs to use different device capabilities.

However, I am interested to know how/where are you using Essentials at the moment? What APIs would be most useful in WPF applications for you? Please reach me out if you want to talk more about it

[mattleibow]

Just something to keep in mind... If we are doing WPF, it may overlap with WinForms. And possibly with general .NET such as console.

[inforithmics]

I have a Xamarin Forms Application that targets Android, iOS, UWP. I'm currently looking into the feasability to Target WPF the main reason is that All Desktop users can use the application, not only Windows 10 Users.

Currently I have an assortment of nuget packages that solve different Features. So if Xamarin Essentials is targeting WPF I could move away from these nuget packages.

So the Areas I'm intrested in WPF are the following.

1. Device Display Information (Orientation) for Layouting.
2. Device Information (For Debugging purposes).
3. MainThread (For accessing UI Elements on the right Thread)
4. Gecoding (For Position to Adress translation)
5. Geolocation (For getting the GPS position)
6. Secure Storage (For saving passwords).
7. File System Helpers (For saving offline Data).

I think this are things that are available on a Desktop PC/Tablet/Laptop.

I haven't looked througly into the Code yet, but if no WPF support is planned I might implement the WPF target myself.

The main reason I Target WPF is that it is Windows only target the .NET Framework or Console apps would need cross platform code (Linux, MacOs, ...).

[JohnGalt1717]

I'd also like the settings functionality as well that did a standardized way of getting and setting app settings into the right folder(s) as json.

And with the Secure Storage I'd like it to also do large files like videos that we could store encrypted on the file system.

[Redth]

@JohnGalt1717 thanks, but please start a new issue for different feature requests.

[jamesmontemagno]

Placing this under: #662

[AlexBrownShi]

I really need Xamarin.Essentials support for WPF! It really detracts from the usefulness of the library if I need to wrap it in something to get it to work on WPF.

Also, very annoying that I have to stub it out in Integration Testing as well, I should just be able to allow .NET to fill in the information.

Please add support for general .NET - how hard can it be?

[AlexBrownShi]

BTW, I'm only using Device Information and Application Information right now. I get why GeoLocation could present issues, but some of these should be easy wins.

[JohnGalt1717]

Well it can be hard but it would be nice to be there. For instance Wpf doesn't have a concept of protected storage. So you'd have to write a wrapper that did encryption/decryption or created a folder that was bitlockered with app having a key.

All non-trivial. But yes, it would be nice if certain things were incrementally added and the rest threw NotImplemented errors.

[gentledepp]

Well could you at least add some way so we can add this functionality ourselves?
Like allowing us to set static fields which currently throw "NotSupported" to our own implementation?

That way, we can already use Essentials for all our Xamarin projects and once you add support for WPF, we can gradually remove our "static overloads" and gracefully migrate to your implementation

[mattleibow]

You could try this: https://github.com/rdavisau/essential-interfaces