windows app sdk

Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich said in May 2026 that Win32 remains the “bedrock” of Windows, acknowledging that nobody in the 1990s expected the 32-bit API surface associated with Windows 95 and Windows NT to remain first-class three decades later. That admission is less a nostalgia item than a...

Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich said in May 2026 that nobody at Microsoft in the 1990s expected Win32, the Windows API lineage associated with Windows 95 and Windows NT, to remain a first-class application surface in Windows 11. That admission is less embarrassing than it sounds and more damning...

Nine years ago, on May 1, 2017, Windows Central argued that Microsoft was preparing to reposition Universal Windows Platform apps around the Windows desktop, not phones, as Build approached and Windows 10 Mobile’s collapse made the old “one app everywhere” pitch untenable. That was not just a...

Microsoft has finally put a name to one of Windows 11 File Explorer’s most noticeable quirks: the reason Home and Gallery scroll smoothly while ordinary folders still feel stepped is that they are not built the same way under the hood. The modern views ride on WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK...

Microsoft’s renewed push for native Windows apps is more than a design preference. It is a quiet acknowledgment that Windows 11 has drifted too far toward the web, and that drift has made the platform feel less distinctive, less efficient, and less worth paying for on premium hardware. If...

Microsoft is finally signaling that it understands a complaint Windows users have been making for years: the operating system cannot keep leaning on web wrappers and still expect to feel like a premium desktop platform. The renewed push for native Windows apps is more than a technical...

Microsoft’s Windows app strategy has entered a familiar and frustrating phase: plenty of tools, plenty of promises, and still no single story that developers can trust. As Windows 11 keeps evolving, more developers are leaning on web apps and WebView2 not because native development is dead, but...

Microsoft’s Windows AI APIs are starting to change the way developers think about on-device intelligence, and Lance McCarthy’s experience shows just how low the barrier can be. What sounds like a big platform shift turns out, in practice, to be a small and highly practical workflow change: use...

Microsoft is quietly setting the stage for one of the most consequential Windows 11 resets in years: a push to rebuild key inbox experiences as truly native apps rather than web-wrapped surfaces. The move, first reported through Microsoft-linked commentary and developer community coverage...

Windows 11’s app problem is no longer just aesthetic. It is strategic, and Microsoft appears to know it. The company is once again signaling that native Windows apps matter, after years in which much of the platform’s default experience drifted toward web technologies, cross-platform wrappers...

Windows 11 is entering a pivotal phase: after years of leaning on web technologies for core experiences, Microsoft now appears to be rebuilding its desktop-app ambitions around native code again. That shift matters because the quality of a platform is often judged not by its shell or wallpaper...

Microsoft is finally talking like a company that remembers what made Windows matter in the first place. After years of leaning on web tech, WebView2, and cross-platform wrappers for everything from Weather to Copilot, the company now appears to be building a new Windows apps team focused on 100%...

Microsoft is moving toward a more native-first Windows 11 experience, and if the shift holds, it could materially improve how the operating system feels in daily use. The core idea is simple but important: replace more web-wrapped interfaces with WinUI and other native Microsoft tools, a...

Microsoft’s reported push to build fully native Windows 11 apps would be more than a cosmetic refresh. It signals a possible reset in how the company thinks about its own desktop software, with WinUI and the Windows App SDK moving back to the center of the story instead of web wrappers and...

Microsoft is signaling a broader reset for Windows 11, and the most interesting part may not be any single feature announcement but the personnel behind it. A new push to improve Windows apps is taking shape around names with strong reputations inside the company and across the developer...

Microsoft’s Windows UI story has always been a tale of ambition colliding with organizational drift, but Jeffrey Snover’s latest critique lands because it frames the problem as more than cosmetic inconsistency. The issue is not just that Windows 11 still exposes legacy UI in odd places; it is...

The long, messy era of mismatched Windows apps — where polished system UI sat beside half-finished, inconsistent third‑party windows — may finally be getting a pragmatic, developer‑facing fix: Microsoft’s WinUI Gallery has been updated to version 2.8, and the changes are squarely aimed at making...

Microsoft’s WinUI team has quietly sketched a practical way to fix one of Windows 11’s most persistent user complaints: the cluttered, inconsistent right‑click context menu. A new split‑menu pattern — shown during a recent WinUI Community Call and surfaced in developer preview materials —...

Microsoft's WinUI team has quietly handed developers the first real tool to address one of Windows 11’s most persistent annoyances: the bloated, hard-to-scan right‑click context menu—by prototyping a split, hybrid menu control that groups related actions under a single, smarter line item...

Microsoft is preparing a targeted overhaul of Windows 11’s long‑complained‑about right‑click menu in File Explorer — a redesign, previewed in WinUI developer materials, that replaces jammed vertical lists with split menu entries driven by a new WinUI control called SplitMenuFlyoutItem...