Windows 10X Launch Plans Leave Developers Confused

Here’s the upshot – if you’ve been watching the Windows developer space, the hot topic at the moment is Project Reunion, which includes Windows UI and will form the building blocks for apps targeting the Windows platform going forward. And then there’s Windows 10X (“10X“), Microsoft’s latest attempt at a cut down version of the Windows operating system that tries to find a different balance between security, usability, performance and functionality (aka applications). You’d have thought that significant planning would have gone into both these efforts to make sure that apps built using Project Reunion will work on 10X. This appears not to be the case, leaving many developers confused as to what the future of the Windows developer platform is.

From this recent post by Windows Central, “Microsoft sets sights on Windows 10X launch for later this year”, it would appear that Win32 based applications aren’t going to be supported by Windows 10X at launch. Yet, a big focus of the initial release of Project Reunion will be support for Win32 based applications. If you read the Project Reunion roadmap, UWP is seldom mentioned. Furthermore, the WinUI roadmap gives no timeline on when WinUI3 will be supported in UWP apps.

The lack of support and/or timeline for UWP apps means that anyone planning to support 10X is going to be questioning the choice of technology. By building a UWP app today (in order to target 10X) they’ll be foregoing the benefits of WinUI3. They’ll also be signing up for some unknown amount of technical debt that needs to be paid out when the migration story for UWP apps is finally revealed.’