alvinhochun / mingw-w64-cppwinrt Goto Github PK

Good news: basic XAML UI works fine.

Bad news: A lot of features missing due to lack of tooling to produce WinMD from IDL, and codegen for an IXamlMetadataProvider implementation.

Visual Studio (or actually a set of special MSBuild tasks, Microsoft.Windows.UI.Xaml.Build.Tasks.dll) scans your WinMD and generates a different set of metadata for XAML use only, resulted in a lookup table in a custom IXamlMetadataProvider implementation. This is to facilitate XAML reflections (activate new object instance, set or get properties, etc) without requring the language to support reflection.

Things like data binding, custom controls and the like will be difficult without this codegen, either by writing IXamlMetadataProvider by hand, or using code-behind code instead of XAML.

Some demo code:

XAML island: https://github.com/driver1998/XamlMinGW

UWP (yes, that UWP): https://github.com/driver1998/CoreAppMinGW

The same UWP running on a phone, with some unsupported controls removed: https://twitter.com/driver1998/status/1666105255120244736?s=19