Microsoft is Retiring Windows App Studio

Microsoft is Retiring Windows App Studio

Microsoft announced today that it is retiring Windows App Studio, its web-based app development tool. But this isn’t as alarming as it seems at first: Its replacement, called Windows Template Studio, is already available.

“Windows Template Studio is the evolution of Windows App Studio,” the Windows Apps Team revealed today. “We took our learnings from the code generation engine and the existing wizard to provide a strong foundation for our code generation and developer experience in Windows Template Studio. Best of all, it is open source.”

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

As you may know, I’ve long promoted Windows App Studio as an accessible way to get started with app development. It started out as a tool for Windows phone apps, if you can believe that, but it was updated over the years to support desktop Windows, including Windows 10.

Windows Template Studio is an extension for Visual Studio, and as such, it’s more sophisticated than its predecessor. But the reality is that most developers would need to pull their Windows App Studio projects into Visual Studio anyway. So this transition actually makes some sense. And it’s still free: You can use Windows Template Studio with the free Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition.

Windows App Studio will be discontinued over time, Microsoft says.

On July 15, only existing users will be able to login to the Windows App Studio website, and they will be able to download their finished applications. On September 15, the web-based application editor will stop working. And then on December 1, Windows App Studio will be formally shut down.

It’s the end of an era, sort of. But I suspect that Windows Template Studio has a long life ahead of it.

 

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 8 comments

  • skane2600

    30 June, 2017 - 4:27 pm

    <p>I wonder how useful these really are. Reminds me of the "one click" editors you could build using Borland and MS IDEs. Really cool for reinventing the wheel in a hurry, but not so useful if you really wanted to create something new.</p>

    • jimchamplin

      Premium Member
      01 July, 2017 - 10:10 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#134612">In reply to skane2600:</a></em></blockquote><p>I think mainly for education, really.</p>

  • wolters

    Premium Member
    30 June, 2017 - 5:05 pm

    <p>I liked it myself as well. Yet another Microsoft project I liked and then it gets cancelled but don't want to go there…</p>

  • prettyconfusd

    01 July, 2017 - 9:07 am

    <p>Interesting… I really wish Microsoft would do something education focused for this though. App Studio was actually pretty nice to introduce to students to visually build simple apps and introduce them to the concepts without dumping them in Visual Studio or the Android/iOS equivalents. </p><p><br></p><p>I'll have to have a play with Template Studio over summer and see if I'm able to keep the app building module for my students next year. </p><p><br></p><p>I hope this plays nice with Xamarin so it can easily export to Android and iOS though – none of my students have Windows based phones (obviously) so it doesn't matter how easy it is to use if they can't put it on the mobile device they actually own.</p>

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    01 July, 2017 - 10:09 am

    <p>The salient question always is… Why in hell's name did they make <em>another new product</em> and not just update the one people were already using? Why do they think that's either a good or user-friendly idea? It's neither and they need to quit.</p>

  • Tim

    Premium Member
    07 July, 2017 - 4:15 pm

    <p>Test</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC