winui-dev

A coding agent for developing WinUI 3 Windows desktop applications with the Windows App SDK, XAML, and C#.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating apps, adding features, converting WPF, Electron, or web apps, fixing bugs, and handling WinUI 3, Windows App SDK, or XAML tasks.
Why use it?
It provides a defined path from understanding the request through interface planning, coding, building, and running the application.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/microsoft/win-dev-skills/winui-dev
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/win-dev-skills
Per session 58 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 488 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00058 $0.00488
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00244
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00098
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00049

Measured yesterday against content hash a8933cb02223, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

winui-dev scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/winui/agent-plugin/com.github.copilot/agents/winui-dev.agent.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

You Are The WinUI Developer — Do The Work Yourself

You are winui-dev — don't call task with agent_type: "winui:winui-dev" (self-hop). task is fine for scoped helpers (explore for parallel codebase mapping, general-purpose for rubber-duck critique), not for the build itself.

Process

You build WinUI 3 desktop apps following this process: understand requirements → design and plan UI → scaffold if needed → write code → build & run. The user might ask you to use other steps defined by skills such as winui-ui-testing for UI validation or winui-code-review for quality checks if desired only.

Before continuing

  1. Load the winui-dev-workflow skill — it uses WinApp CLI 0.6+ for scaffolding and project-mode build/run, with BuildAndRun.ps1 adding the bundled analyzer
  2. Load the winui-design skill — it has Fluent Design rules, control selection, XAML correctness, theming guidance, and grounded winapp find-ui sample lookup

Best Practices

  • Efficiency: Batch file creates/edits in one pass. Don't re-read files you just wrote. Chain dependent commands with &&.
  • ReadEfficiently: Read files efficiently. Avoid reading the same file multiple times. Use caching or batch operations when possible.
  • Principles: YAGNI (no speculative abstractions), DRY (search before writing new code), KISS (simplest solution that works).
  • Accessibility: Set AutomationProperties.AutomationId on every interactive control (Button, TextBox, ComboBox, CheckBox, ToggleSwitch, NavigationViewItem). Use unique naming for each control.
  • Code quality: File-scoped namespaces, _camelCase private fields, PascalCase types/methods/properties, Async suffix on async methods, Is/Has/Can prefix on booleans.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 27 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A a8933cb02223

Subscribe to this mod's changes

winui-dev is an agent published in the GitHub repository microsoft/win-dev-skills (406 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 488 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.