As my last video recommendation from Build this time around I will recommend taking a look at Jeff Burtoft talking about PWA’s on Windows. To me it is one of those topics where I mostly end up picking parts that are suited for what I am building, without going into everything under the umbrella. In that way, this talk suits me very well, because Jeff dives into the fairly few essentials they believe are required for a web app to be considered progressive.
Actually he boils it down to 3 topics:
- https (security)
- Web app manifest (naming, look and feel)
- Service workers (caching and offline)
The talk starts out by covering these topics, and some of the work they are doing to make Windows 10 the best platform for Progressive Web Apps. He then spends some time elaborating on how they will discover PWA’s for the store, and how you can self publish your app, with PWA builder. Sonarwahl is also demoed, to show how you can check your site, and make improvements on security, speed and accessibility.
Windows API’s
The next part is pretty much a sales speech, on the value adds of being a Windows Store App. It leads up to demoes of Windows API’s that enable features like controlling tiles, voice activation and calendar integration. I like this part, because the demoes look fairly simple to implement, but it will enable some very nice user experiences.
As a real world example Charlie Croom from Twitter joins Jeff on stage, to show how they build their PWA with Windows integration. He also covers that hard parts about working with the API’s, so it is worth watching. Especially diving into how they use code splitting to ensure the code is only downloaded and run for Windows users, and not burdening users on other platforms.
Finishing up Jeff comes back on stage, and dives into how you can call C# WinRT code from a PWA, and use intellisense and breakpoints. His demo is very basic, but pretty cool to see this level of integration. He also shares a few thoughts on where they are going in the future.
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