Creating a good-looking SplitView in UWP

Question

I followed a tutorial for adding a SplitView control to my page. The code looks like:

<SplitView x:Name="MainSplitView" DisplayMode="CompactOverlay" IsPaneOpen="False" CompactPaneLength="50" OpenPaneLength="150">
        <SplitView.Pane>
            <StackPanel Background="Gray">
                <Button x:Name="HamburgerButton" FontFamily="Segoe MDL2 Assets" Content="&#xE700;" Width="50" Height="50" Background="Transparent" Click="HamburgerButton_Click" />
                <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
                    <Button x:Name="MenuButton1" FontFamily="Segoe MDL2 Assets" Content="&#xE825;" Width="50" Height="50" Background="Transparent" />
                    <TextBlock Text="Button 1" FontSize="18" VerticalAlignment="Center" />
                </StackPanel>
                <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
                    <Button x:Name="SettingsButton" FontFamily="Segoe MDL2 Assets" Content="&#xE713;" Width="50" Height="50" Background="Transparent" FontSize="18" />
                    <TextBlock Text="Settings" FontSize="18" VerticalAlignment="Center" />
                </StackPanel>
                <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
                    <Button x:Name="AboutButton" FontFamily="Segoe MDL2 Assets" Content="&#xE897;" Width="50" Height="50" Background="Transparent" FontSize="18" />
                    <TextBlock Text="About" FontSize="18" VerticalAlignment="Center" />
                </StackPanel>
            </StackPanel>
        </SplitView.Pane>
        <SplitView.Content>
            SplitView content here
        </SplitView.Content>
    </SplitView>

But the final result looks like this. Not really cool.

How can I reach something like the Insider Hub's?

Answer 1

The modern way of doing this is using NavigationView. It looks great by default and requires less messing around to implement. It's built-in to the OS since build 16299 and available in WinUI 2 for downlevel support.