Microsoft had precious little in the way of new Windows development announcements this week, so it offered up some rehashing instead.
‘Building great apps on Windows should be easier, no matter how your app is written,” Microsoft’s Kevin Gallo writes in a blog post tied to Ignite 2020. “Today, at Microsoft Ignite I’m excited to share the progress we’ve made to simplify app development and give you a great developer experience.”
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
Here’s what he discusses.
Project Reunion. Basically a do-over for the failed Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Project Reunion is a way to combine Win32, the classic desktop application environment, with UWP and extrude it on the other side as some kind of weird mash-up of the two. The big deal here is that technologies that were previously locked into UWP, and thus non-accessible by the majority of developers who correctly ignored UWP, are now being decoupled from UWP and made available separately. There is no new information or news regarding Project Reunion, and the next pre-release milestone is presumably still expected in November.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft previously backported WSL 2 to Windows version 1903 or higher, giving all WSL 2 users “the same performance parity as Windows 10 version 2004.” Microsoft also previously added support for Linux graphical user interface (GUI) apps to Insider builds. But there is no new information or news regarding WSL at Ignite.
Windows Terminal Preview 1.4 is at least “new,” but it’s also a minor update and only available now in preview. This release will let you click on links inside the terminal and have them open in your default browser. And it provides support for jump lists and a new command palette.
React Native for Windows v.0.63 was released two weeks ago. This technology lets web developers create new apps for Windows 10 or upgrade existing apps, and this latest version supports navigation, improved theming, automatic linking of native modules, and services that allow inter-module communication. But there is no new information or news regarding React Native at Ignite.
And that’s it.