In addition to the functionality and security of its operating system and applications, Microsoft takes great care of the appearance and interface of its projects. In fact this is one of the things that is being looked at the most in recent times, as they do not stop showing.
Thus, the Redmond firm itself has just published a preview of WinUI in its version 3 for desktop applications. Moreover, it should be noted that with all this what will be possible is that developers adopt the appearance and experience of the UWP. Of course, all this will be accomplished without having to adopt the UWP application model.
To start we will tell you that WinUI is the Microsoft interface framework for the Windows Universal Platform. As we told you just a few days ago, in a recent event of the firm, you could see the launch of WinUI 3 Preview 1, which also supports Win32 applications. This means that developers will be able to create desktop applications using visual components that previously only worked in UWP.
UWP and Win32 applications will look similar
As you can imagine, in a few months both types of applications will have a very similar interface and external appearance. Of course, UWPs are sandbox , so for example they have restricted access to the file system. By contrast, a Win32 or desktop application has access permissions to the user’s own file. While a UWP is suspended or activated if the user minimizes or maximizes it, Win32 runs until we close them.
By this we could say that the owners of Windows, come with additions related to security or power management. But with the new WinUI Microsoft surrenders before the compatibility over the modernization of the software in Windows. But for now we should know that WinUI 3 has many limitations, especially on the Win32 side. One of the most notable is that the content of WinUI 3 can only be in one window per process.
If we ask ourselves for the moment when developers can use all of it, there are a couple of dates that are discussed. The first is November 2020 , when WinUI 4 preview is scheduled. For its part, there is also speculation with the spring of 2021. Whatever the final date of all this, WinUI 3 can be defined as a milestone for Windows developers.
WinUI will revolutionize the use and appearance of applications in Windows
In addition to sharing APIs for Win32 and UWP , it is also worth noting the arrival of other functions such as input validation. This would bring greater consistency to the Windows 10 ecosystem and its interface design. At the same time, we could say that Microsoft is now more focused on making its products work well on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, than on fixing design problems.
Equally external developers also have this problem, so Redmond developers face requests to create cross-platform WinUI. If we consider that Windows 10 is present in more than a billion devices , this is a very important goal for developers. However, too many changes of address have been seen, or the failure of the Microsoft Store . Hence the movements that are now taking place regarding the applications that will work in the operating system.