Microsoft Provides a Small Update on the Windows App SDK

In early August, Microsoft finally responded to the many complaints it’s received from developers about the Windows App SDK (WASDK). Today it provided a small update to its plans to fix things.

“Since our announcement, we’ve been making steady progress untangling the codebase from proprietary layers in preparation for both Phase 1 and Phase 2 outlined in the original plan,” Microsoft software engineer Beth Pan wrote today in a comment-based update to the August 1 announcement. “I hope to share more soon and start working with everyone more openly.”

In the original August 1 post, Pan said that her team was entering a “new phase of focused improvements over the next 6 months, including product work and foundational changes to support a more open and collaborative future.” She also said that Microsoft would ship Windows App SDK 1.8 in August and then move on to a series of minor updates that it could ship more quickly.

Microsoft did ship a preview of WASK 1.8 on August 19, and now Pan says that the stable release is “coming soon.” This will let her team complete phase one of its new plan, during which it will “begin more frequent mirroring of internal commits to GitHub to increase transparency and show progress,” by early October.

Phase 2, during which it will allow developers to “clone and build the [WASDK] repo locally, with documentation to guide setup and dependencies,” is still in active development, she says. And she hopes to share “tangible progress” soon.

The end game here, so to speak, is the open sourcing of the WASDK, including the WinUI 3 user interface framework, so that the community can shoulder more of the much-needed work to keep this whole mess up-to-date and fix the many problems that Microsoft has ignored for years. But before that can happen, there’s also phase 3 to consider. During this phase, developers will be able to submit GitHub pull requests to request updates and other fixer.

“I know,” Pan admits, “we should already be doing this. I hope to share more soon and start working with everyone more openly.”