Experimental channel release notes for the Windows App SDK 1.0

  • Article

Important

The experimental channel is not supported for use in production environments, and apps that use the experimental releases cannot be published to the Microsoft Store.

The experimental channel provides releases of the Windows App SDK that include experimental channel features that are in early stages of development. APIs for experimental features have the Experimental attribute. If you call an experimental API in your code, you will receive a build-time warning. All APIs in the experimental channel might have breaking changes in future releases, but experimental APIs are especially subject to change. Experimental features may be removed from the next release, or may never be released.

Important links:

Latest experimental channel release:

Latest stable channel release:

Version 1.0 Experimental (1.0.0-experimental1)

This release supports all experimental channel features.

Download

The following sections describe new and updated features, limitations, and known issues for this release.

WinUI 3

This release of WinUI 3 is focused on building towards new features for 1.0 stable and fixing bugs.

  • New features: Support for showing a ContentDialog per window rather than per thread.
  • Bugs: For the full list of bugs addressed in this release, see our GitHub repo.
  • Samples: To see WinUI 3 controls and features in action, you can clone and build the WinUI 3 Gallery app from GitHub, or download the app from the Microsoft Store.

For more information or to get started developing with WinUI, see:

Push notifications (experimental feature)

This release introduces a push notifications API that can be used by packaged desktop apps with Azure app registration-based identities. To use this feature, you must sign up for our private preview.

Important limitations:

  • Push notifications are only supported in MSIX packaged apps that are running on Windows 10 version 2004 (build 19041) or later releases.
  • Microsoft reserves the right to disable or revoke apps from push notifications during the private preview.
  • Microsoft does not guarantee the reliability or latency of push notifications.
  • During the private preview, push notification volume is limited to 1 million per month.

For more information, see Push notifications overview.

Windowing

This release includes updates to the windowing APIs. These are a set of high-level windowing APIs, centered around the AppWindow class, which allows for easy-to-use windowing scenarios that integrates well with the Windows user experience and other apps. This is similar to, but not the same as, the UWP AppWindow.

Important limitations:

  • This release of AppWindow is currently available only to Win32 apps (both packaged and unpackaged).
  • The Windows App SDK does not currently provide methods for attaching UI framework content to an AppWindow; you're limited to using the HWND interop access methods.
  • The Windowing API's will currently not work on Windows version 1809 and 1903 for AMD64.

For more information, see Manage app windows (Windows App SDK).

Deployment for unpackaged apps

This release introduces updates to the dynamic dependencies feature, including the bootstrapper API.

Important limitations:

  • The dynamic dependencies feature is only supported for unpackaged apps.
  • Elevated callers aren't supported.

For more information, see the following articles:

Other limitations and known issues

  • No support for Any CPU build configuration: The Windows App SDK is written in native code and thus does not support Any CPU build configurations. The WinUI 3 templates in Visual Studio only allow architecture-specific builds. When adding the Windows App SDK to an existing .NET application or component that supports Any CPU, you must specify the desired architecture: x86, x64 or arm64.
  • .NET apps must target build 18362 or later: Your TFM must be set to net6.0-windows10.0.18362 or later, and your packaging project's <TargetPlatformVersion> must be set to 18362 or later. For more info, see the known issue on GitHub.
  • C# apps using 1.0 Experimental must use one of the following .NET SDKs: