Reassessing Project Reunion (Premium)

Like some real developers, I’ve gone through what I call the three stages of irrational exuberance with Project Reunion only to land back in reality.

Frankly, I miss the fantasy.

As you may recall, Microsoft announced Project Reunion during its Build 2020 virtual conference in late May. At the time, it was described as a way to unify the Windows 10 application development experience, but my take at the time was that it is a modern replacement for UWP and a way to use APIs that were locked into UWP in other developer frameworks.

That view is correct, actually. But it only hints at the full strategy and, more to the point, the full scope of what Reunion really is, and what role it plays in the broader strategy.

But I spoke of the three stages. They are:

Ding, dong, the witch is dead. My initial impression was that Microsoft was finally (if only implicitly) admitting that UWP failed and was finally (if belatedly) moving past UWP. I felt this one personally because I accurately reported what a key decision-maker in this part of Microsoft said at the previous Build (2019)---that they had “killed” UWP---and was roasted repeatedly for this accuracy.
No, there is another. Project Reunion only addresses Windows 10 app development. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the notion that any developer would start a Windows-only app here in 2020 is, of course, ludicrous. No, what developers need today is some cross-platform solution. My opinion is that that platform, ultimately, will be the web. But Microsoft has its own cross-platform framework coming. It’s called .NET MAUI, but it won’t arrive until November 2021 in 1.0 form. And that might be too late, because, well, Flutter exists.
Reality bites. Put simply, Project Reunion is not the way forward, just like UWP was never the way forward. What it really is, for the most part, is a way to bring modern features, starting the previously-locked UWP user experiences, to existing apps. This is the primary role that Project Reunion will play. At least in the short term.

Some of my cartwheeling there was self-inflicted; Microsoft released so much information at Build 2020 that it was hard to absorb it all, let alone understand it. I didn’t fully understand what was happening with .NET MAUI, for example, until days later. And the evolution of my understanding of what Project Reunion really is was informed by me actually using it and creating both WinUI Desktop and WinUI application projects in the preview version of Visual Studio.

But even that creeping understanding was undercut by the fact that Microsoft never adequately or fully explained Project Reunion. And as is so often the case when it comes to developer topics, I have my friend Rafael to thank for clarifying this for me, and for the world.

“Project Reunion isn't a new application model or platform from Windows,” he tweeted last week, addressing the many misconceptions about this strategy. Project Reunion isn't ...

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