Announcing: WinUI 2.6! 🎨💻🎉

The team has just released WinUI 2.6! This release contains visual updates to most of our controls, a few new controls, bug fixes, and new functionality for use in UWP apps.

Release highlights

New controls

• Expander
• BreadcrumbBar
• AnimatedIcon
• PipsPager
• ImageIcon

Control visual updates

Most WinUI controls now support the latest Windows styles. These new styles align with the current design direction of Windows, and will provide your app with the most modern, up-to-date visual experience.

New materials

WinUI 2.6 is the first release to introduce Mica, which is a new material that incorporates theme and desktop wallpaper to paint the background of long-lived windows such as apps and settings. You can apply Mica to your application backdrop to delight users and create visual hierarchy, aiding productivity, by increasing clarity on which window is in focus.

Mica is specifically designed for app performance as it only samples the desktop wallpaper once to create its visualization.

New features

• SplitButton in CommandBar: You can now easily integrate a SplitButton into CommandBar using the SplitButtonCommandBarStyle and AppBarElementContainer wrapper class.
• Popup location: Several new APIs were added to the Popup class to allow developers to specify the direction how CommandBarFlyout opens up to ensure it is placed in a desired location relative to the item it is being involved from.

Bug fixes

To see the full list of bugs fixed in this release, see the official GitHub release.

Get started

If you’re new to WinUI, get started by following the steps in this doc: Getting started with the WinUI 2.x library

If you’ve used WinUI in the past, get started with 2.6 by downloading the latest NuGet package: NuGet Download

Helpful links and resources

Release Notes - learn more about what’s new in this release

XAML Controls Gallery - a sample WinUI app that shows you all of our controls in action, including the new controls and features in this release

API Reference Documentation - in-depth details about the new APIs added for this release

Thank you!

Your contributions as a developer community have been incredibly valuable in shipping WinUI. We’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who contributed to this release by filing or fixing bugs, requesting features, implementing features, and generally being a significant part of the development process!

[Tropix126]

This looks great! Is there an estimate or rodemap on when these styles will arrive on WinUI 3?

[FrayxRulez]

I remember a few of us mentioning the issue with dim Acrylic flyouts, as if the shadow layer renders on top - so not entirely sure if this is the same issue, or something new. As I understand it, WinUI is using DropDownShadows instead of the older Elevation based ThemeShadows

It’s a new one, and it’s a complete deal breaker for me, must be fixed asap: https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/5277