Microsoft Project Reunion update hopes to make developing Windows 10 apps a breeze

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(Image credit: Shutterstock / Elle Aon)

Microsoft’s Project Reunion initiative to simplify the life of Windows 10 app developers has taken another step towards its first stable release.

First announced at the Build 2020 conference by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Project Reunion is the company’s attempt at streamlining its development platform by removing the disparities that crept in with the release of Windows 8.

In essence, Project Reunion is a set of software tools that will bridge the gap between the two main application protocol interfaces (APIs), Win32 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) that Windows developers use for writing apps.

Keen to showcase the project’s progress at this year’s Build 2021 conference, Microsoft pushed through a preview release of the upcoming 0.8 release, that’s got some impressive features and is the penultimate release before a 1.0 release expected sometime in Q4 2021.

What’s new?

Microsoft explains that the 0.8 preview release offers Windows app developers all the benefits of the 0.5 release along with the ability to take the new unpackaged app support preview for a spin.

“With the Project Reunion 0.8 preview you can create and modernize your Windows apps seamlessly for both client and cloud endpoints,” note the project’s developers.

Project Reunion is not a new app model, but rather a set of libraries that developers add to their existing apps to modernize them. 

Although the release currently works on a limited number of Windows 10 releases, once it reaches the 1.0 milestone, it will work on all supported versions of the operating system

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.