Proposal: DIALOGEX-to-XAML converter

[reli-msft]

Proposal: DIALOGEX-to-XAML converter

Summary

WinUI team could provide a converter that converts legacy DIALOGEX resources into XAML so application authors could modernize their applications faster.

Rationale

• There are many existing legacy applications that havily uses DIALOGEX and CreateDialog to create dialog boxes. A professional application may have hundreds of dialog boxes and manually convert them into modern XAML window is not a feasible task. Therefore if WinUI could provide an automated tool to convert them it will be extremely helpful for application upgraders.
• People are heavily complaining design inconsistency in Windows applications, while dialog boxes is the thing that produces many complains.

Scope

Capability	Priority
A tool that converts DIALOGEX resource into WinUI XAML pages.	Must
A drop-in replacement for CreateDialog that interprets the converted XAML and mimick the old API's behavior.	Could

Open Questions

Another option may be create a function that directly interprets DIALOGEX-like resources using WinUI controls.

[ranjeshj]

@Austin-Lamb This is an idea for xaml islands maybe.

[prayaas-a]

An idea: a modern looking XAML control for common dialog box scenarios that supports largely the same APIs as legacy versions, so it's as easy as literally renaming the old calls. Could this be a modified ContentDialog, perhaps as a different control to ensure that existing ContentDialog usage isn't affected?

[mdtauk]

If WinUI 3.0 includes a Window object/scenario - then something like this makes sense.

[Austin-Lamb]

Thanks for filing this!

This is an interesting idea to make it easier to migrate from Win32 to WinUI - for now I'm going to put this on our backlog, we would not be able to afford this feature for WinUI 3.0 but it's an interesting suggestion.