There’s a bit of fanfare going on at the moment because Microsoft have released the first preview of Visual Studio 2022 (announcement / download) which is significant because this is the first version of Visual Studio which will be 64bit. Note, this isn’t the first version that supports 64bit development, it’s the first version where the IDE itself is 64bit.
After downloading the preview the first thing I wanted to try out was creating a Project Reunion / Windows UI (WinUI) application. Unfortunately the extensions for Project Reunion aren’t part of the Visual Studio 2022 installer. What’s worse is that neither the stable or preview version of the Project Reunion extensions are compatible with Visual Studio 2022. You’d think this would be somewhere on the priority list, right?
Anyhow, luckily all is not lost, since the extensions are really just a bunch of application/library templates. In order to develop your WinUI application in Visual Studio 2022, all you need to do is create your application in Visual Studio 2019 (either stable or preview builds are fine) and then open your solution in Visual Studio 2022.
That’s it – there’s nothing else you need to do.
If you’re having issues creating a new WinUI application in Visual Studio 2019, you may be running into .NET sdk related issues. Follow the instructions here to target the .NET 5 sdk that you have installed.
Ha. How simple.
I was about to give up on checking out MAUI until it was more stable too.
Thanks 🙂
Thanks for the heads up! I guess it’s a quirk with the release timing… When “Project Reunion” is released under its final (1.0) extension name “Windows App SDK”, I guess it’ll also support VS 2022 RTM.
It feels like we’re in this weird transition period for many things right now. Like how WinUI 3 doesn’t support the latest Windows 11 controls/styles, but WinUI 2.6 does, which doesn’t support .NET 5+…
By Q4 2021, I think much will get better here.
Yes that’s totally the case – things will settle over coming releases. I’m guessing WinAppSdk v1 will be pushed out the door in line with roadmaps regardless of feature completeness (no disrespect to all the hard work the team are putting in) and then there will most likely patch fixes (for stuff that just wasn’t thoroughly tested) and point releases for features (eg XAML Islands) that won’t make v1 and yet are super important.