[Passwordsafe-devel] UWP Branch

[Alberto R. <in...@po...>]

Hi Everyone,
My name is Alberto, I’m a Windows and UWP developer and I’ll give you some details about the new uwp0 branch in the Password Safe repository.
Since I’m a long time user of the Password Safe application, I really needed to access my password database on my Lumia 950. One day I grabbed the password safe source code and started to work on it.
Thanks to the multiplatform nature of the project, the model and the view are well separated, so if I could make the os and core libraries compile on the UWP platform, I only needed to make a new “shell".
Luckily, especially in C++, many standard libraries and Win32 APIs are still accessible in the Universal Windows Platform, there is also a Universal CRT but I’m not an expert C++/CX programmer.
Anyway, after a couple of months of work I was able to make a simple read-only app that has been published in the Windows Store https://www.microsoft.com/store/p/password-safe-beta/9nblggh52t2r

To make it work, I modified the os and core libraries and added a new project under src/ui/UWP. The major changes to the os and core libraries were in the file I/O. I excluded a lot of code initially but I’m gradually putting it back as I make sure it compiles and enable more features. The objective is to gradually minimize the changes to those libraries and work only on the UWP shell code so we can merge it easily with the master branch.
At the moment I’m working to enable the editing features and add more code from the original codebase that has been excluded. When I’m done with it, much of the effort will be towards the quality of the code and the merge with the master branch. Also there are many innovative features from the uwp platform that we can add to the project like Windows Hello integration, which we can use to access the password safe db through fingerprint and/or iris recognition without entering our extremely long master password 😉

You can build and run the app on your local machine or deploy the appx package on another W10/W10M device by enabling developer mode. The app is not linked to any developer account, while the Password Safe Beta app in the Windows Store is linked to my developer account and I keep locally the changes needed to publish that app. Rony or someone else can open another developer account and take over for the publication of the app. The name Password Safe is not available in the Windows Store, but we should keep an eye on it because if after 1 year no app is published that name becomes available again.

I hope other UWP developers will join my effort, together we can move this great application to the next era. If you have any question about the UWP port you can contact me or Rony.

Cheers,
Alberto