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With the first release of Project Union, Windows developers will finally be able to easily write apps that offer the newest features of Windows 10.
Microsoft first announced Project Reunion at its Build 2020 conference, and CEO Satya Nadella described Project Union as the company’s latest initiative to facilitate application development for Windows 10.
With the release of preview v0.1, Microsoft is finally putting that plan into action. In essence, Project Union is a set of software tools that will bridge the gap between the two main application protocol interfaces (APIs) that Windows developers use to write applications.
Plumbing for developers
Microsoft will develop Project Union on GitHub under the MIT license. “Project Reunion is our vision to unify and evolve the Windows development platform to make it easy to create great applications that work on all versions and devices of Windows 10 that people use,” the developers describe on GitHub.
The need for Project Reunion arose because the latest builds of Windows 10 use the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) API to access the latest features, which are not available in earlier versions of Windows 10. At the same time, the Legacy Win32 API, with fewer features, works on all Windows 10 systems.
Unsurprisingly, most application developers choose to work with the Win32 API to achieve greater scope. However, this prevented them from taking advantage of the latest Microsoft developments.
With Project Reunion, application developers will now have unified access to the Win32 and UWP APIs.
The limited preview lays the foundation for Project Reunion runtime distribution and also gives developers the opportunity to see some of the work that Microsoft has done to help them implement Project Reunion into their development toolchain.
Via: ZDNet
