WinUI InfoBar and InAppNotification

[marcelwgn]

With the new InfoBar control, a lot of use cases for the InAppNotification control can now be achieved with WinUI/UWP controls. The question is how these will continue in the future; should InAppNotification coexist? Should InfoBar reach feature parity and InAppNotification will be deprecated? Or should InAppNotification become a helper built on top of InfoBar?

[michael-hawker]

Thanks @chingucoding, great question!

In #3770 we updated the InAppNotification to better match the InfoBar styling, but I see us either inheriting from InfoBar in the future directly or becoming an extension to InfoBar/TeachingTip.

Basically the extra 'sauce' that InAppNotification provides is the message queuing/stacking and controlling the visibility of the control automatically within the UI.

This is something that currently neither InfoBar or TeachingTip provider currently? If they don't plan to have helpers for that in WinUI, I think we still have opportunities in the Toolkit to provide value on top of the platform controls.

We should investigate this more for 7.1 and either introduce new extensions on top of the WinUI controls and deprecate InAppNotification, if that makes sense compared to inheriting from InfoBar and inline replacing our existing InAppNotification control.

[xperiandri]

Basically InfoBar is just a single item of InAppNotification

[mdtauk]

Hopefully once InfoBar gets support for an overlay and/or stacked mode - it can supplant the Toolkit control, and then it can be deprecated.

[xperiandri]

I don't think it will ever happen. InfoBar is a single item. InAppNotification is some hybrid that looks like a single item but behaves like an items control.

[xperiandri]

https://xamlbrewer.wordpress.com/2021/01/04/introducing-the-winui-infobar-control/

[michael-hawker]

To clarify, when I say 'stack' its a logical stack. Our current InAppNotification control just is a single item and swaps out the content, so it's not an ItemsControl. It's not like other notification systems which should multiple messages physically stacked on top of one another. That'd be a new/different feature than what's currently implemented.

[xperiandri]

I use Elmish MVU with logic in .NET Standard library. So that InAppNotification instance is not available there.
It means that I need to create some service in order to call methods on it.

Much easier would be to integrate with an items control. In that case I would need only to declare Notifications collection property and a command RemoveNotification.
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