Release Updates Archives - Windows Developer Blog https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/tag/release-updates/ Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:04:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.4 https://blogs.windows.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/06/cropped-browser-icon-logo-32x32.jpg Release Updates Archives - Windows Developer Blog https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/tag/release-updates/ 32 32 What’s new in Windows App SDK 1.6 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2024/09/04/whats-new-in-windows-app-sdk-1-6/ Wed, 04 Sep 2024 22:00:03 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=57086 We are proud to announce that version 1.6 of the Windows App SDK is now available! Whether you’re looking for the incredible performance boost and footprint reduction of Native AOT support, enhancements for deploying your

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]]> We are proud to announce that version 1.6 of the Windows App SDK is now available! Whether you’re looking for the incredible performance boost and footprint reduction of Native AOT support, enhancements for deploying your package, or quality of life improvements for controls like PipsPager and RatingControl, WinAppSDK 1.6 offers a raft of new features, performance boosts and structural changes that enable you to make your native Windows apps better than ever before.  The Windows App SDK provides a rich set of APIs and tools to help you build beautiful and fast Windows desktop apps, including any C++ Win32 or C# .NET app. You can harness the modern controls and polish of WinUI 3, which ships as part of the WinAppSDK, or if you have an existing app that uses Win32 such as WPF, you can take advantage of only the parts of the SDK that you need. The WinAppSDK also stays up to date with frequent and OS-independent releases so your app can always access the latest innovations.

Get started with the Windows App SDK 

Check out the Windows App SDK overview page to learn more about it and see how to get started. Then, if you’re ready to dive into Visual Studio and begin with your first WinUI 3 app, see our setup instructions to start developing Windows apps.  

New features and improvements 

Native AOT support 

With 1.6, the Windows App SDK now supports native Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation! When publishing your app as a Native AOT app, you produce an app which has been compiled ahead of time to native code for faster startup time and a smaller memory footprint.  We’re very excited to bring the powerful capabilities of Native AOT to developers through the Windows App SDK! In our sample Contoso Camera app, we measured a 50% reduction in start time, an ~8x reduction in package size when using a framework package and a ~2x reduction in package size when using Windows App SDK in self-contained mode. While your results might vary, we encourage you to give Native AOT a try if it’s right for your app!  GIF of Bloom screensaver moving For more information about Native AOT, see Native AOT deployment. To get started with Native AOT in your Windows App SDK app, see our release notes for 1.6 for what you need to know and how to set it up. 

Decoupled WebView2 versioning 

Instead of embedding a hard-coded version of the Edge WebView2 SDK into the Windows App SDK, we now consume the Edge WebView2 SDK as a NuGet reference in 1.6. If your app uses WebView2 to display content, you can now choose a newer version of the Microsoft.Web.WebView2 package if you need to instead of the version that came with the Windows App SDK. Additionally, you can now reference NuGet packages which also reference the Edge WebView2 SDK, streamlining your dependencies.   With these updates, we’ve decoupled the WinAppSDK from the Edge WebView2 API surface and brought NuGet’s sophisticated package management capabilities to the WebView2 space. Your WebView2-powered app experiences are now more versatile than ever and can tap into the newest WebView2 offerings at any time! 

New Package Deployment APIs 

Flexible and robust package management has been a mainstay of the Windows App SDK since its inception, and with the release of 1.6 we’re only making it better. We’ve improved package management APIs with new enhancements and quality-of-life updates including package removal, provisioning and detection of pending registration and locally available updates, easy feature availability detection for light-up scenarios and more. If your app uses MSIX packaging, these enhancements are tailored to make your life easier!   For more details, you can peruse the pull request here or take a peek at the full spec here. 

Improved TabView tab tear-out 

The WinUI 3 TabView control has received a substantial update to the tab tear-out experience in 1.6 in the form of a new CanTearOutTabs mode, overhauling how a user drags tabs out of your app in a major way. In the new mode, dragging a tab out of your app’s TabView is very similar to the tab drag experience in Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome where a new window is immediately created during the drag. This allows users to visually see feedback of their action right away and it lets them drag the new window to the edge of the screen to maximize or snap it in one continuous motion.  If you enable the new CanTearOutTabs mode in your TabView, you won’t have to worry about any drag-and-drop API limitations because it doesn’t use them. And, you won’t have to worry about whether tearing tabs out of your app will work if the app is run as an Administrator, because that’s supported. The developer and user experiences are seamless and smooth. If your app uses TabView, you should take the new tear-out mode for a spin!  GIF of new CanTearOutTabs mode in your TabView, showing paragraph moving

Other control updates 

While smaller in scale, in 1.6 we’ve added some polish and updates to a few other controls in WinUI 3 as well. PipsPager now supports a new mode that wraps between the first and last items:  GIF of highlight moving through dots between two arrows And RatingControl is now more customizable since we moved some previously hard-coded properties to the theme resources. Now, you can override these values in your app to handcraft RatingControl’s appearance.  Screenshot of stars in a rating system We’ve also unsealed ItemsWrapGrid, which is a backwards-compatible change.  Screenshot of line of code with first word highlighted

Additional updates 

And finally, we’ve added a few other new APIs and features to round things out for 1.6. We filled a gap from UWP with a new ColorHelper.ToDisplayName() API, and we added a new Microsoft.Windows.Globalization.ApplicationLanguages class in MRTCore that includes a new PrimaryLanguageOverride feature for fine-tuning your app’s display language. 

Staying in the loop 

You can stay up to date with the team on the Windows App SDK GitHub repo and the WinUI GitHub repo, and through our quarterly WinUI Community Calls where we share roadmap updates and other exciting news, as well as demo new features.  You can also connect with us on X using #WindowsAppSDK and @WindowsUI.  We look forward to seeing the beautiful apps you create with WinAppSDK 1.6 & WinUI 3!  Happy coding!  Windows App SDK team ]]> Delivering Delightful Performance for More Than One Billion Users Worldwide https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/05/26/delivering-delightful-performance-for-more-than-one-billion-users-worldwide/ Fri, 26 May 2023 16:01:38 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56776 Over the past year, we have made major strides in improving fundamentals across Windows.  From enhancing Windows’ speed and reliability to optimizing the performance of its flagship applications to improving Window’s sustainability, we have been

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]]>
  • We improved frequently used shell interactions like Taskbar, Notifications, and Quick Settings by as much as 15%!
  • Getting users into productivity faster by improving the time it takes to get to the desktop by 10% and reducing the impact of startup apps by over 50%.
  • Making PCs more sustainable with our new Energy Recommendations and Carbon-Aware Windows Update. We see a 6% average reduction in energy consumption for the users who use the recommended energy settings
  • Windows 11 is the most reliable version of Windows ever, with recent updates continuing to improve reliability.
  • Microsoft Edge starts up faster than ever before and saves memory with features like Sleeping Tabs, which saves up to 83% of memory for background tabs.
  • The new Teams app for Windows is 2x faster while using half the resources.
    • Today, we’re going to give you a behind-the-scenes peek into how performance improvements are delivered!  Windows operates at a massive scale – with over one billion users and a rich PC ecosystem, and there are innumerable combinations of usage patterns, key apps, and hardware.  Windows is foundational to many products too, each with varying needs – it powers your PC, it is the host OS for Azure, and it is core to Xbox and HoloLens.  With Windows 11, we are also releasing more frequently, increasing the need to protect against regressions and shortening our cycle for driving improvements.  Thankfully, we have built infrastructure and tools that help us find, understand, and fix performance problems at the massive scale Windows operates at.

    Delivering Performance at Scale

    If you go back 10 years ago, life as a performance analyst in Windows was challenging!  We would develop an operating system for months before it was released to external users as a beta release, and then we responded to bugs that were filed by our users and partners.  When you received a bug indicating users had performance issues in some scenarios, we did not always have the information necessary to root cause the bug.  Reproducing the issue was often a challenge.  Once you have found and understood the issue, how do you know how common it is?  As you can imagine, this process was slow and cumbersome.  Fast forward to today, when it’s hard to even remember those days. Today we have a richer, more comprehensive story to guarantee great performance.  It starts during the design phase, where teams define strong performance goals to ensure our products meet the needs of our users.  Significant research has gone into users’ expectations, and we rely on that research to guide our goal-setting for user interactions.  We call these “interaction classes”, and they help us set targets and ensure we have the right UX affordances for experiences, whether they’re a nearly instant interaction like opening the Start Menu or longer like deleting files. During development, we protect performance with daily performance gates that measure key Windows performance indicators ranging from Windows UX experiences, application experiences, resume from standby/sleep, memory and storage, and more.  Every day, we run over one million machine hours of validation.  This helps protect our daily build quality and ensures that teams can be productive.  Once we complete selfhost and evaluate our performance measures on our own devices, we flight builds to our vibrant Windows Insider community who provides us rich feedback on quality issues they observe across a breadth of device configurations and use cases. Diagnostic data by the numbers: (1) Over 2.5 million cabs per day; (2) over 12 million performance traces per year; (3) over 70.4 billion scenario performance data points per year. The scale of feedback we receive, both through feedback and perf diagnostic data, is massive.  Over the past few years we have invested in capturing performance and other Windows quality measures via diagnostic data in addition to backend services to analyze the information we get and to identify issues.  For important scenarios, we can now see the distribution of the real-world performance observed by our users across our broad ecosystem of devices.  Performance is a spectrum, not one number, and what you experience on your system may be quite different from another user with different hardware, running different apps, and using their system differently.  Another key innovation for us is the ability to analyze traces at scale and find issues that are on the critical path of a scenario’s responsiveness. This is a rich tool that allows us to tease apart what is causing performance issues in traces – ranging from scenario-specific code, IO delays, all the way down to kernel level scheduling optimizations and even driver quality issues.

    Deploying These Techniques to Ensure Delightful Experiences

    Delivering a great Instant On experience (Resume from Modern Standby with Windows Hello) With Windows 11, you can get back to productivity more quickly than ever with Windows Hello and Instant On.  Most laptops today use Modern Standby and Windows Hello to offer a password-less logon experience.  Our goal is to get you back to productivity in seconds, and our latest generation of Surface PCs, like the Surface Laptop 5 and Surface Pro 9 are 10% faster than the prior generations.  We were able to achieve this with performance improvements in silicon, camera drivers, display drivers, and the OS over the last few releases. A responsive, fluid, and fast Windows experience requires great baseline performance and the ability to deliver that consistently.  The negative performance feedback we receive for Windows Hello is infrequent, but when it occurs, it is often due to longer times to unlock your device.  Here is a look at how Windows engineers improve the baseline performance and consistency for scenarios like Instant On.
    • Measurement: All performance analysis starts with adding code to emit diagnostic data events that can be used for measurement or identifying system resource usage. We rely heavily on ETW to measure daily results to ensure we prevent regressions prior to selfhost.
    • Optimize the baseline: We analyze ETW traces through automated trace analysis techniques using DataLayer and in some cases, manually using Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). In WPA, engineers deploy a range of analysis techniques from resource usage (like CPU Analysis) to critical path analysis to identify issues in software and hardware that can be optimized.
    • Optimize the distribution at scale:
      • Using the optics that engineering teams add to their features, we observe light weight performance data (e.g. overall time for Windows Hello face authentication) across a diversity of Windows hardware. From this data, we can see the gap between the 90th/95th/99th percentiles and more common cases at the 10th and 50th percentiles.
      • We then collect verbose performance diagnostics at scale from a smaller sample of Windows users across a diversity of hardware and Windows OS configurations.
      • We then leverage our automatic trace analysis techniques using resource usage and critical path analysis, to build a stack chart of performance issues across the distribution and their relative impact. This scale analysis helps us deeply understand the performance bottlenecks across a broad range of devices and helps us prioritize the most impactful opportunities.  This chart shows an example of this analysis for Windows Hello face authentication.
      • Finally, we double-check a set of the top performance traces in these buckets from the scale approach to confirm the insights from scale analysis and build a solution with engineering teams.
    • Listen to customer feedback: Feedback from customers through channels like Feedback Hub help us identify areas where we need new optics or investigation outside of our current flow. For Instant On, our team monitors a few Feedback Hub categories and contexts like "Power and Battery >> Sleep" and "Security and Privacy >> Windows Hello Face." When customers "Add more details" in Feedback Hub by reproducing and hitting "Record my issue," we have the rich data necessary to diagnose problems effectively.
    Across recent Windows 11 updates, we have optimized:
    • More security with better performance for Enhanced Secure Sign-On (ESS). ESS provides increased security by building memory enclaves that can be hidden from the rest of the system.  We improved performance by up to 10% in cases where the system is under memory pressure by more efficiently handling the secure enclaves’ large slabs of memory.  This also enables us to ship on a larger range of RAM sizes.
    • Consistent Windows Hello performance with app orchestration. When you resume your machine and kick off Windows Hello, apps also start resuming in the background and can consume system resources, slowing down your Hello performance.  We delay the resume of these apps until after Windows Hello camera startup and face authentication is complete.
    These features are now available to customers and will enable faster Instant On experience with fewer Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) on the lock screen that can save up to 8% in cases where many apps are resuming.

    What Is New?

    We continue to invest in ensuring core Windows scenarios have great fundamentals.  Over the course of the last year, we also asked each feature team-building experiences in Windows to take a close look at their features to find additional opportunities to optimize the OS experiences.  We were surprised and energized by the breadth of optimizations made across the entire product, and we are excited to bring these improvements to all our customers. We started this effort by conducting trainings across the entire organization on best practices, techniques, and educating the organization on the latest tools and techniques for performance analysis.  The energy and momentum that this created was invigorating as every team was empowered to improve any part of the operating system they chose.  This effort resulted in over 300 different performance improvements across Windows!  Here is a subset of some of the improvements available for you on all your Windows 11 devices. Faster, more responsive post-boot experience Today, when you boot a PC, there are a number of things that happen behind the scenes.  If you have a lot of apps registered to start at boot, it can be a stampede of apps all clamoring for resources to launch.  While investigating a boot perf issue, we experimented with moderating app startups. What we found was we can both ensure the apps the user is trying to interact with are responsive and prioritized, and also that in many cases the background apps finish launching faster due to reduced contention.  Rather than unleash all the start up apps at once, we moderate their launches.  This helps avoid significant contention at launch and ensures the foreground app the user is interacting with stays performant and responsive. These improvements most benefit devices with fewer resources, and we measured a 25-50% improvement in application launch times in the time period after logon in our experiment with multiple startup apps.  The image below helps visualize this, where we moderate startup apps to ensure that user-initiated operations can run with less contention.  In this example, you can see the user’s app completes its launch faster, and the background startup apps also complete in a similar timeframe due to less contention for resources. File Explorer improvements We made several improvements in File Explorer, including improving launch time of File explorer for users who have files stored in the cloud by avoiding I/O to enumerate cloud files.  We also looked at deleting files and made improvements to bulk file delete operations by over 40% as shown in our results below! While it may be rare for users to delete large numbers of files on their device all at once, the example shows the breadth of the improvements we set out to bring to Windows 11 users. Reduced game stutter with high report rate mice We know gamers hate stutter, and we’re fixing issues throughout Windows so that an untimely frame-freeze won’t take gamers out of their immersive experiences.  Gamers love to push their systems to the limit in search of the best experiences in-game.  Many also use sensitive, high DPI, high report rate mice to shave milliseconds off their response times and increase precision.  At the same time, the world of gaming is more connected than ever with gamers relying on an increasing number of background apps while playing, like voice chat, streaming, apps for configuring your keyboard, mouse, or graphics card, and more.  The Windows input stack was being pushed to its limits with high report rate mice and their input being delivered to not just the game, but also multiple background processes.  In turn, that caused a significant amount of time processing input rather than providing as many cycles as possible for rendering the game experience. We set out to reduce the amount of processing time it took to handle input requests by throttling and coalescing background raw mouse listeners and capping their message rate.  Prior to these changes, we observed on a Surface Laptop Studio with a 1000 Hz mouse, a test bed of background listeners, and popular games that there was significant stutter.  After the improvements, on the same setup, we now deliver a smooth, uninterrupted gaming experience and preserve the low latency, high precision input experience in games while being efficient with input for background listeners! [caption id="attachment_56786" align="alignnone" width="600"] Figure 1: Before our changes[/caption] [caption id="attachment_56787" align="alignnone" width="600"] Figure 2: After our changes[/caption] Something for everyone While the examples above highlight some of the improvements in the February and May updates, there are many other improvements available today, including:
    • Taskbar improvements to ensure Taskbar is readily available after logging in
    • Task View performance improvements when devices are under heavy load
    • Improved performance of Windows Notification Service
    • Improved launch time of Quick Settings and Notification Center
    • Reduced threads, dlls, and graphics device count in Explorer
    • Reduced CPU usage of explorer
    • Reduced memory usage of Notification Center
    • Touch keyboard performance improvements
    • Resource usage reductions in multi-user scenarios
    • Reduced voice access and Narrator latency in larger documents
    • Improved voice typing activation time
    • Improved speed of theme changes
    • Reduced size on disk by leveraging features-on-demand via the Store
    For developers, there is a lot coming in the May release too.  Some highlights that intersect fundamentals:
    • New enhanced kernel minidump format for better debugging
    • Live kernel dumps can now be collected directly via Task Manager
    • New richer, more actionable third-party reliability data views in Partner Center
    • Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) is now supported and available on Arm devices

    Applications That Run on Windows Have Improved

    There are great recent wins across key apps on Windows as well that we should celebrate.  We partner closely with these teams, share approaches to performance and fundamentals, and collaborate on improvements. Microsoft Edge performance improvements Browsing the web is one of the most common activities users perform.  Edge continually invests in not just improving the browsing experience for users, but in improving performance and minimizing resource usage.  Sleeping Tabs was introduced in Edge over a year ago, and the team has continued to improve the effectiveness of it to reduce memory and power usage of tabs.  Most users have up to 7 tabs open at any point in time, and while only 1 tab is often visible, those other tabs can have significant impacts on both memory and power. With Sleeping Tabs, when you switch away from a tab we can reduce the memory and CPU usage of the background tabs, and just as importantly, we are able to resume faster than if we fully discarded the background tab.  Our diagnostic data shows that at the 75th percentile, a tab can consume as much as 400MB of private working set.  With up to 6 tabs in the background, this adds up to nearly 2.4GB of memory being consumed.  With Sleeping Tabs, we can reduce the private working set of a tab down to 75MB!  A savings of nearly 2GB of memory (83% reduction), providing memory to other applications and services.  In addition, we have seen an over 15% improvement in the startup time of the Edge browser! When you are mobile, getting the most out of your battery is important so you can keep working until you can plug in again.  Efficiency mode in Microsoft Edge helps you get the most out of every charge.  Through efficient reduction of CPU usage, Microsoft Edge can extend battery life on average of 25 minutes when efficiency mode is active. The New Microsoft Teams App for Windows Microsoft Teams has exploded in popularity over the past few years, and the team intently focused on scale and rapid growth.  Together, we spent quite a bit of time understanding the common use cases and scenarios.  A big focus for the team was moving to a new architecture and backend services that drove a 2x performance improvement, while consuming half the resources.  Bold fundamentals goals were set that required the team to step back and rearchitect significant parts of the software that enables all of us to connect and collaborate across the globe!  For more details on the improvements made with the new Teams client refer to the Teams blog.

    Thank You and What’s Next

    We continue to invest in driving performance, efficiency, and reliability with every update, and we are excited to have you experience these improvements firsthand.  Please continue to share feedback, and a very special thanks to our Windows Insider community for helping us continue to improve Windows for the over one billion users worldwide.  We have more on the way this coming year, and we are looking forward to ensuring your Windows experience gets better with every update.]]>         What’s New in Windows App SDK 1.2 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/11/16/whats-new-in-windows-app-sdk-1-2/ Wed, 16 Nov 2022 14:30:24 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56643 We are excited to announce that Windows App SDK 1.2 is now available! With WinAppSDK 1.2 you can now create widgets for the Windows 11 widget board, use the most modern WinUI controls – including media playback & InfoBadge, and support HDR graphics

    The post What’s New in Windows App SDK 1.2 appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     Get started with Windows App SDK To start using Windows App SDK, see Get started with Windows App SDK to set up your development environment and learn more about the components included in this release. If you want to jump right in with building your first WinUI 3 desktop app, start with our tutorial or watch our Learn Live session released at Build 2022.

    Functionality introduced in Windows App SDK 1.2

    Widgets for third-party applications

    With the launch of Windows 11, we introduced the widgets board featuring content curated by Windows. Widgets provide a glanceable view of important information with one touch access from the taskbar or swipe from the left side of a touch screen and are populated by apps currently installed on the device. Now with the launch of Windows App SDK 1.2, we are excited to make this functionality available for third-party developers to create widgets for their packaged Win32 apps and test them locally on the Windows 11 widgets board through our Windows Insider Program.  By creating widgets for your apps, your customers can easily and seamlessly stay up to date with information that matters to them. To get started developing Widgets for your app, check out the Widgets development docs and Widgets design fundamentals for prerequisites, guidance and best practices.

    Latest WinUI controls including media playback

    WinUI 3 apps can play audio and video with the MediaPlayerElement and MediaTransportControls media playback controls. For more info on how and when to use media controls, see Media players. WinUI 3 has been updated with the latest controls, styles, and behaviors from WinUI 2.8. These updates include the addition of the InfoBadge control, improvements to accessibility and high contrast mode, as well as bug fixes across controls. For more details, see the release notes for WinUI 2.7 and WinUI 2.8.

    Voice and video calling in WinUI 3 apps via Azure Communication Services (ACS)

    You can now add voice and video calling capabilities to your WinUI 3 applications that run on Windows, enabling rich communication experiences for desktop PCs. Azure Communication Services use the same infrastructure, services, and technologies that power Microsoft Teams calling experiences. Check out our conceptual documentation overview and try out quick starts and samples:

    DisplayInformation

    Windows desktop apps can now support High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Auto Color Management (ACM) through the DisplayInformation class in WinAppSDK. This API is easier to use than ever before for Win32 apps, and app developers can now use one API to target Windows version 1809  and later. The DisplayInformation class enables you to monitor display-related information for an application view. This includes events to allow clients to monitor for changes in the application view affecting which display(s) the view resides on, as well as changes in displays that can affect the application view.

    Support for Visual Studio Arm64

    As early as Project Reunion (now WinAppSDK) 0.5, apps developed with WinAppSDK were able to run on Arm64. Starting with Visual Studio 17.3 Preview 2, you will be able to natively develop applications with WinAppSDK on Arm64 devices. To get started developing on an Arm64 device, check out our docs detailing Windows on Arm and Arm64 Visual Studio.

    Trimming for .NET apps

    You are now able to publish your .NET WinAppSDK apps trimmed. With CsWinRT 2.0, the C#/WinRT projections distributed in the WinAppSDK are trimmable. Publishing your app trimmed can reduce the disk footprint of your app by removing any unused code from trimmable binaries. Your app may also see a startup performance improvement. With a basic Hello World app, we have seen a ~80% disk footprint improvement and a ~7% startup performance improvement when published trimmed. With WinUI gallery, we have seen a ~45% disk footprint improvement. For more details on how you can enable trimming, trimming limitations (such as reflection against trimmable types), and trim warnings, see Trim self-contained deployments and executables.

    Dynamic Refresh Rate

    Introduced in Windows 11, Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR) enables devices to seamlessly switch between a lower refresh rate and a higher refresh rate based on what users are doing on their PC. This helps to balance performance and power consumption. As part of WinUI 3 in Windows App SDK 1.2, Microsoft.UI.Composition will now support Dynamic Refresh Rate on devices that opt-in to the feature. Notably, through supporting DRR, devices running Windows 22H2 will automatically have smoother scrolling and interactions in your app without any other changes. To learn more about how to best support Dynamic Refresh Rate in your app, check out our Dynamic Refresh Rate Tool (built on WinAppSDK 1.1) which shows how to use the Compositor Clock API and support SwapChains.

    AppNotificationBuilder

    In Windows App SDK 1.1, we introduced the ability to create and send notifications from your application or a cloud service. App notifications can be used to inform the user of application status or state changes, or to prompt the user to take action with engaging and rich UI. With WinAppSDK 1.2, we’re introducing the AppNotificationBuilder, an alternative to XML payload to simplify creating and defining these notifications. To get started using the AppNotificationBuilder to create app notifications, check out the AppNotificationBuilder spec on GitHub. Also see Quickstart: App notifications in the Windows App SDK for an example of how to create a desktop Windows application that sends and receives local app notifications.

    Additional updates

    Outside of the new functionality introduced in WinAppSDK 1.2, there are also several performance, reliability, and development experience improvements. Of note, the WinAppSDK 1.2 binary on x64 is 11% smaller than WinAppSDK 1.1.5. Check out the release notes for the full list of fixed issues and updates in WinAppSDK 1.2.

    Upcoming experiences on WinAppSDK

    We are working with several development partners internal and external to Microsoft who are migrating their experiences to WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK. Stay tuned on our social channels for more information about these partnerships.

    Staying in the loop

    You can stay up to date with the team on the Windows App SDK GitHub repo and the WinUI GitHub repo, and through our monthly WinUI Community Calls where we share roadmap updates and other exciting news, and we demo new features. You can also connect with us on Twitter using #WindowsAppSDK and @WindowsUI. We look forward to seeing the beautiful apps you create with WinAppSDK 1.2 & WinUI 3! Happy Coding! Windows App SDK team]]>         Available today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 aka Project Volterra https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/10/24/available-today-windows-dev-kit-2023-aka-project-volterra/ Mon, 24 Oct 2022 17:00:16 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56625 Available today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 aka Project Volterra appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     Windows Dev Kit 2023 is an Arm-powered device built by Windows developers for Windows developers. Everything you need to develop Windows apps for Arm, on Arm. Powerful AI. All on one device.   We are excited to announce the launch of Windows Dev Kit 2023, which is built to help developers create Windows apps easily and efficiently for Arm. We unveiled this device as “Project Volterra” at Build in May 2022.  Learn more.   The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is now available to developers in 8 countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. You can purchase the dev kit here.  

    Starting now developers can build, run, and test Windows apps for Arm on a single compact device 

    With Windows Dev Kit 2023, developers will be able to bring their entire app development process onto one compact device, giving them everything they need to build Windows apps for Arm, on Arm.  The Windows Dev Kit 2023, powered by the Snapdragon® 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform and utilizing the Qualcomm® Neural Processing SDK, makes it easy for developers to leverage the platform’s advanced AI capabilities to deliver best-in-class Windows user experiences. This device sports 32 GB RAM and 512 GB fast storage, along with multiple ports: built-in Wi-Fi 6, physical ethernet, 3x USB-A and 2x USB-C, and a Mini Display port for easy and flexible connectivity to your devices, displays and networks. You can also drive up to 3 external monitors simultaneously, including 2 at 4K 60Hz which provides all the screen real estate that most developers need.  Learn more on how to set up your device.  

    Delivering NPU powered AI capabilities in your apps without compromising performance 

    In addition to enjoying a simplified development process for Arm, developers can now bring AI enhanced experiences into their apps powered by the NPU.       Windows Dev Kit 2023 enables developers to build apps that unlock the power of the NPU hardware to accelerate AI/ML workloads delivering AI-enhanced features & experiences without compromising app performance.  You can get started now and access the power of the NPU through the open source and cross-platform ONNX Runtime inference engine, making it easy to run AI/ML models from popular machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow. To learn more, see our page with instructions and samples.  The Luminar Neo team at Skylum moved their AI models to run on the Windows Dev Kit 2023 NPU and witnessed incredible performance – On certain models, the NPU is about 80-90 times faster than CPU and about 20 times faster than GPU – leaving the CPU to perform the logical tasks it is intended to do. 

    We are beyond excited that some of the ISVs had an opportunity to run and test their apps on Windows Dev Kit 2023.

    You can learn about some of their experiences below:
    1. “Compiling natively to Arm worked very well. The Windows Dev Kit 2023 is an absolutely great machine for end users due to low power and low heat. We leave it running 24/7 and it runs cool.” - Mike Rozhdestvenskii, Director of Software Engineering at Developer Express  
    2. "Performance with Volterra has been refreshingly fast. We have run Actipro’s x86-based product installers, and they all worked. Our WPF and WinForms controls all work well with no changes, even the ‘API-heavy’ ones, as does all test collateral." - Boyd Patterson, Senior Software Engineer, Actipro Software 
    3. “The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” - Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto 
    4. “I’m using the Volterra device at my home office at the moment. So far it’s been a nice experience; it is impressively fast, doesn’t slow down while testing our product with Windows on Arm collateral.” - Adam Barton, Member of Technical Staff 
    5. “So far things have been really great. Volterra is running incredibly faster than the previous Arm based Windows machine we've been using with our LLVM and MySQL workload. It is a very light, efficient and powerful device.” - Niyas Sait, Technical Lead for Windows on Arm Project at Linaro 
    6. “The Volterra device was easy to set up. We are using them as a pseudo dev & debug environment and have found them to be really solid dev machines.” - Ryan Butterworth, Manager, Security Engineering at Riot Games 
    7. “We’ve been running emulation on Volterra, and in native Arm64, everything runs much faster.” - Konstantin Bulenkov, Project Manager at JetBrains 
    8. “I use Volterra primarily for remote desktop connecting, and remote debugging on it works well. I’m enjoying the 32GB of RAM and storage on a compact device. It is substantially faster than the previous Arm based Windows machine I was using earlier.”  - Koby Kahane, Software Engineer 

    Arm-native toolchain provides a fast, familiar, and highly productive developer experience  

    To enhance developer productivity, we have made great progress delivering on the commitments we made at Build in May 2022 to launch a comprehensive native toolchain for Arm native apps.   We have released previews of the following and many of these will be generally available by the end of the year. 
    • Previews of IDEs (Visual Studio 2022 17.4),  
    • Tools & Runtimes (Windows App SDK with native Arm support),  
    • Libraries (VC++ Runtime), Toolchain (.NET7) 

    Available Now: 

    • .NET Framework 4.8.1 with the Windows 11 2022 Update so the large ecosystem of .NET Framework apps can also run natively on Arm64.  
    • Cloud services (Azure VMs) 
    • Arm64EC 

    Visual Studio 2022 17.4 now runs natively on Arm dramatically improving performance 

    We are committed to delivering continuous innovation to our developer community and have heard developers say, “Not being able to run Visual Studio natively on Arm is a big roadblock.” Over the last three months, we have delivered monthly preview releases of the Arm native Visual Studio 2022 17.4. This version includes support for the following: 
    • Desktop workloads (C++ and C#) 
    • Windows SDK and Windows App SDK components (Win UI). 
    • Web, UWP, Node.js and Game Development workloads.  
    We wanted to go beyond improving production runtime scenarios and improve the experience for developers. So, we added support for developer productivity features like Edit and Continue/Hot Reload and profiling tools so developers can be as productive using the Arm64 version of Visual Studio as they are on x64 today.  Visual Studio 2022 17.4 and .NET 7 will be generally available in the next couple of weeks with support for additional workloads coming later. 

    .NET 7 closes the gap between x64 and Arm64 delivering functional parity and improved performance for Arm  

    With .NET 7 we have made several improvements for Arm in the areas of functional parity and performance. .NET 6 had some features that worked on x64 but not Arm64, with .NET 7, and we are excited that we closed this gap for our developers by adding support for ASP.NET Core Module (ANCM) so ASP.NET Core apps can use IIS on Arm64 in addition to Kestrel server.  To boost performance, we have added vendor-specific optimizations so your apps run well on a variety of Arm hardware. We have several runtime improvements to targeting server throughput (RPS) and latency. For more information about this see our blog post on Arm64 Performance Improvements in .NET 7.   Developers will need to install the toolchain as needed for their workloads on Windows Dev Kit 2023. Some tools and services may require additional licenses, fees, or both.   More apps, tools, frameworks, and packages are being ported to natively target Windows on Arm and will be arriving over the coming months. In the meantime, thanks to Windows 11’s powerful emulation technology, developers will be able to run many unmodified x64 and x86 apps and tools on their Windows Dev Kit. 

    New Azure VMs featuring Ampere Altra Arm-based processors deliver a cost-effective and power-efficient option 

    Many developers today run workloads and execute builds and tests in the cloud.   Developers can now take advantage of the recently introduced Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor.  The new Azure VMs are now generally available and support various Linux OS distributions in addition to the Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise Windows. Learn more about Azure’s Arm-based VMs.  More details on hosting and running Azure DevOps and GitHub CI/CD workloads will be shared in the coming months. Stay tuned! 

    A growing Arm ecosystem... 

     We have ported several 1p Apps over to Arm including a few below to provide better native performance.  
    1. Microsoft Teams 
    2. Microsoft 365 
    3. Microsoft Edge 
    4. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE)  
    5. OneDrive  
    In addition, we also have a growing ecosystem of 3P ISVs across Creativity & Collaboration, Security, VPN and more that have ported their apps over to Arm to provide native support for Windows on Arm. 
    1. Creativity & Collaboration apps - Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Zoom 
    2. Printing – HP Smart Universal Print Driver  
    3. Security solutions – Crowdstrike Falcon, Panda Security, ESET Endpoint Antivirus, Sophos Intercept X, NetWitness XDR  
    4. VPN products – Palo Alto Networks Global Protect, Cisco Anyconnect, F5 Big-IP Edge Client, Ivanti Pulse Secure, NetMotion VPN, OpenVPN 
    5. Benchmarking solutions – PassMark PerformanceTest, Nexthink Collector, 3Dmark Night Raid & Wild Life 

    Need assistance in porting your applications to Arm64? Leverage our App Assure service  

    The App Assure service was launched to fulfill Microsoft’s promise of application compatibility: your Windows apps will work on Arm. If you encounter an application compatibility issue or technical blocker while porting your apps using Windows Dev Kit 2023, App Assure engineers are here to help! The program has succeeded in helping many key ISVs in porting their applications and drivers to Arm64.   Learn more about App Assure compatibility assistance here. To connect with App Assure, visit aka.ms/AppAssureRequest or send an email to achelp@microsoft.com to submit your request for app compatibility support for Windows Dev Kit 2023. 

    Looking to the future… 

    At Build 2022, we unveiled the vision to enable seamless AI inferencing across cloud and client through our emerging model of hybrid compute and AI with NPU enabled devices. We are working on this vision, and we will share more details in the coming months.   The Windows Dev Kit 2023 represents another step in creating a new developer platform that will enable you to build high-ambition cloud-native AI applications. With the native Arm64 Visual Studio, .NET support, and Windows Dev Kit 2023 we want to empower you to take the first step on this journey. You can get started today by building on our cloud and taking advantage of our tooling and services.  We will also continue to invest in the Arm-native toolchain, building partnerships and collaborations that will grow this ecosystem. We are excited about Unity’s commitment to bring the Unity Player to Windows on Arm natively! Developers using the leading game engine will be able to easily target Windows on Arm devices for their current and future titles to get native performance. More details on timing will be shared at a later date.  This is just the beginning of what will be possible. We can’t wait to see what you build.  For more information on the Windows Dev Kit 2023, tune into the Arm Dev Summit, which will take place virtually on October 26. ]]>         Arm64 Visual Studio https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/06/14/arm64-visual-studio/ Tue, 14 Jun 2022 19:44:58 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56569 You don’t want to miss this: Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 is now available as a native Arm64 application on Windows 11!

    “We're thrilled to join our Windows, .NET, and C+

    The post Arm64 Visual Studio appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     You don’t want to miss this: Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 is now available as a native Arm64 application on Windows 11! “We're thrilled to join our Windows, .NET, and C++ partners in building a vibrant Arm64 developer toolchain. Today we deliver the latest version of Visual Studio that significantly reduces the dependence on x64 emulation. While the capabilities of the x64 emulator have expanded, we know that the very best Arm developer experiences will be supported by tools that run natively on Arm64.” Head over to the Visual Studio blog to read the full Arm64 Visual Studio blog post and see what this latest release could mean for you!]]>     What’s New in Windows App SDK 1.1 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/06/03/whats-new-in-windows-app-sdk-1-1/ Fri, 03 Jun 2022 18:58:41 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56446 To help you build native, engaging, and modern Windows applications, we’ve just released the 1.1 version of the Windows App SDK. Building off of the 1.

    The post What’s New in Windows App SDK 1.1 appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     1.0 release in November 2021, we’re excited to bring several new features and capabilities to the Windows App SDK while increasing its stability & performance. The Windows App SDK is the starting point for building and shipping Windows desktop apps (spanning C++ and .NET) with WinUI 3 controls and WebView2 for modernized UI development. Keep up to date with new feature updates by participating in the GitHub repo and following the product roadmap.

    Get Started with Windows App SDK

    To start using Windows App SDK, see Get started with Windows App SDK to set up your development environment and learn more about the components included in this release. If you want to jump right in with building your first WinUI 3 desktop app, start with our tutorial or watch our Learn Live session as part of //Build 2022.

    User experience

    Alongside numerous stability improvements, Windows App SDK 1.1 includes several new and updated features across its component areas that you can take advantage of in your applications to delight your users.

    WinUI 3

    WinUI 3 applications are now able to use Mica & Background Acrylic materials. Mica is an opaque, mode-aware material new to Windows 11 that incorporates the user’s background color to delight users and create visual hierarchy. To apply these materials to the backdrop of your application check out the new SystemBackdrop example in the WinUI 3 Gallery. The WinUI 3 Gallery has been updated to include several new controls & samples alongside a visual refresh to showcase the Windows 11 design language.

    Notifications

    MSIX-packaged, sparse-packaged, and unpackaged apps can now send Windows app notifications (also known as toast notifications) and push notifications to inform users when they are not currently using the app. This means you can send app notifications locally or from your own cloud service. You can also send raw notifications from your own cloud service to deliver new updates to your app in a power-efficient and dependable way. Check out our notification UX guidance for best practices around designing useful, productive, and engaging notifications.

    Elevation

    WinAppSDK 1.1 removes constraints from 1.0 that prevented running an app as an administrator. Development, administration, and system management tools can now leverage the full power of Windows App SDK.  For full support, ensure that your target devices have the latest updates for Windows 11 and Window 10 (May 2022 servicing updates). Support for Windows 10 LTSC 2019 is coming in a future servicing update.

    C# Performance Improvements

    C# apps will see significantly improved performance in many different scenarios through updates in the WinRT interop layer. In a simple Hello World WinUI 3 app, you can expect to see startup times improved by ~9% compared to our previous WinAppSDK 1.0 release.  Another common scenario where improvements can be seen is with dependency properties in WinUI 3 apps.

    Windowing APIs

    Windowing APIs now allow you to control the relative z-order of your windows. This is a WinRT version of the SetWindowPos’s hWndInsertAfter functionality. Each AppWindow represents a top-level window that you can move above or below other top-level windows. Samples are being written to illustrate the different scenarios for manipulating the relative z-order among your app’s windows. In custom drawn title bars, you are now able to easily create a tall titlebar (i.e., taller system caption controls and drag region). This allows for a more touch friendly user experience in your app whilst providing more room for interactive content in the title bar such as a search box or person picture. The title bar customization documentation provides more details about how and when to implement a taller title bar. Another useful feature introduced in this version of Windows App SDK is the ability to change the size of your window based on the client area size. This allows you to set the size of the client area, and then resize the window’s non-client area to match this. In other words, removing the need to calculate the overhead that the non-client area has to get a specific client size. In addition to these new APIs, there are also changes to the default Presenter applied to an AppWindow when using GetFromWindowId() to get hold of it. The change in behavior is non-breaking in that you will still have a default Presenter of the same type as before (OverlappedPresenter), but it will not block any window style changes coming from outside of the AppWindow/OverlappedPresenter API surface.

    Developer experience

    WinAppSDK 1.1 brings several features that will make your experience easier & simpler when building desktop Windows apps. App Lifecycle & Restart With Windows App SDK 1.1, you are now able to programmatically restart your application and set recovery options after app termination due to events such as an app update, app crash, or hang. This means you can recover app state after unexpected restart and your users are immediately back to interacting and engaging with your application. These capabilities are available as part of the new AppInstance.Restart() API in the AppLifecycle class. This is a lifted and synchronous version of the UWP RequestRestartAsync()API now available for both packaged or unpackaged desktop applications.  Check out the Restart API docs on GitHub for usage & reference information.

    Template Studio

    Template Studio for WinUI (C#) is now available! Template Studio is an extension for Visual Studio 2022 that accelerates the creation of new WinUI apps using a wizard-based experience. Projects created with this extension contain well-formed, readable code and incorporate the latest development features while implementing proven patterns and leading practices. The generated code includes links to <> documentation and TODO comments that provide useful insight and guidance for turning the generated projects into production applications. If you’re new to WinUI/Windows App SDK or want more scaffolding like MVVM out-of-the-box in your new projects, Template Studio for WinUI (C#) is a great way to get started!

    Self-contained applications

    Windows App SDK 1.1 introduces support for self-contained deployment where your app carries the WinAppSDK dependencies with it. This enables you to control the WinAppSDK version and use different deployment strategies, like xcopy deployment. Learn about the differences between framework-dependent and self-contained deployment and follow the self-contained deployment guide to get started.

    Bootstrapper APIs

    The Bootstrapper APIs required for using WinAppSDK features (e.g. WinUI 3, MRT Core) in apps that don’t deploy with MSIX are now easier to use and troubleshoot. Updates include a new user UI prompt, additional logging to the event log, and additional options to handle failures including calls to DebugBreak() and/or FailFast. These changes were largely motivated by feedback from our community; thank you!

    Environment Variable Manager

    With WinAppSDK 1.1 you are now able to add, remove, and modify environment variables without having to directly use the registry API. Now, changing EVs in the process, user, and machine scope is one unified experience. Additionally, in packaged apps, EV changes made by the environment manager will automatically revert to reduce the amount of EV changes that apps leave behind. Check out EV Manager on GitHub for more info.

    Staying in the loop

    You can stay up to date with the team on the Windows App SDK GitHub repo and the WinUI GitHub repo, and through our monthly WinUI Community Calls where we share roadmap updates and other exciting news, and we demo new features. You can also connect with us on Twitter using #WindowsAppSDK and @WindowsUI. We look forward to seeing the beautiful apps you create with WinAppSDK 1.1 & WinUI 3! Happy Coding! Windows App SDK team]]>         Babylon.js 5.0: Key Engine Advancements – Part 3 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/05/16/babylon-js-5-0-key-engine-advancements-part-3/ Mon, 16 May 2022 21:18:23 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56464 Our mission is to create it one of the most powerful, beautiful, and simple web rendering engines in the world. The latest Babylon.js 5.0 engine packs a ton of new improvements to help you create stunning experiences.

    Unlimited Morph Tar

    The post Babylon.js 5.0: Key Engine Advancements – Part 3 appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]> Unlimited Morph Targets

    No matter what you call them, Blend Shapes, Shape Keys, or Morph Targets, Babylon.js 5.0 adds rocket fuel to your ability to use influenced vertex positions. This new feature now gives you literally unlimited amounts of Morph Targets. Want to have a complex animated face with thousands of Morph Targets to get that perfect expression? Now you can, all in the web, all for free! See it in action here: Unlimited Morph Targets Demo Learn more: Unlimited Morph Targets Documentation YouTube Series: Tech Artist’s Journey YouTube Playlist

    Order Independent Transparency

    Rendering transparent objects is complicated! The Babylon.js Platform has always strived to make it as easy as possible to help you inform the system of rendering order, alpha index, run depth-prepasses, and much more, so your scene can look correct. With Babylon.js 5.0 we’ve wrapped a bow on it all. All of the complexity of rendering transparent objects can now disappear with one single, simple line of code: Try it out: Order Independent Transparency Demo Learn More: Order Independent Transparency Documentation

    WebXR Advancements

    WebXR is an incredible web standard allowing web developers to create amazing cross-browser XR experiences. Using WebXR to add a mobile AR component to your web site can be a simple and fun way to engage your readers/users even further. While the technology to render world-locked 3D objects has existed in Babylon.js for some time, Babylon.js 5.0 steps the beauty-factor up several notches with the introduction of Light Estimation. This powerful yet easy-to-use new feature allows your Babylon.js scenes to estimate the light in your real-world location and automatically match the lighting and shadows of your virtual world-locked object. This creates a cutting-edge level of immersion between the physical and digital worlds…and it’s all here in Babylon.js…all for free! Babylon.js 5.0 also adds support for WebXR image tracking and WebXR Layers!!! Check it out on your Android Phone: Light Estimation Demo, Image Tracking Demo Learn More: Light Estimation Documentation

    glTF Updates

    The Babylon.js Platform prioritizes support for the absolute latest and greatest advancements to the glTF file format. This means every new version of Babylon.js unlocks new beautiful advancements in rendering capabilities, and Babylon.js 5.0 turns up the heat! With full support for KHR_materials_volume, KHR_materials_transmission, and KHR_materials_ior, you can now render some absolutely STUNNING visuals! Check it out: KHR_materials_volume Demo Learn More: KHR_materials_volume, KHR_materials_transmission, KHR_materials_ior

    Mixed Reality Toolkit for Babylon.js

    Babylon.js 5.0 also adds updated support for the world's most advanced 3D interface component library, Mixed Reality Toolkit. This advanced library makes it incredibly easy to add advanced XR UX elements into your Babylon.js scenes such as: holographic slates, 3D Sliders, Touch Holographic Buttons, Touch Mesh Buttons, and much much more! Check it out: MRTK Demo Learn More: MRTK Documentation

    Material Plugin Manager

    When it comes to creating real-time shaders power, performance, and flexibility are critical! Babylon.js 5.0 brings introduces a brand new feature that doubles down on all of three. The Material Plugin Manager gives you the ability to add custom code to any Babylon.js shader. This means that you can fully customize any advanced shader, such as PBR, to go even further. The Material Plugin Manager provides developers with the flexibility to fully customize the power, performance, and look of any shader! Check it out: Material Plugin Manager Demo Learn More: Material Plugin Manager Documentation

    Much Much More

    Wow that’s a lot, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg! Improved Shadow Performance, Vertex Animation Textures, a brand-new Build System, there’s more to Babylon.js 5.0 than you can imagine! Want a full view of everything that’s new? For a full list of features, enhancements, and fixes you can head on over here. Babylon.js 5.0 launches the Babylon.js platform to incredible new heights and we cannot wait to see you reach for the stars with it!]]>     Babylon.js 5.0: News Tools – Part 2 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/05/13/babylon-js-5-0-news-tools-part-2/ Fri, 13 May 2022 20:04:50 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56454 We are artists, developers, creators, and dreamers and we want to make it as simple as possible to enable everyone to bring their ideas to life. With this new version of Babylon.js, we set out to make it even easier to develop thanks to a suite of ne

    The post Babylon.js 5.0: News Tools – Part 2 appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     Animation Curve Editor Creating and modifying animation data in a rendering engine can be complicated and verbose, but not anymore! Babylon.js 5.0 adds a built-in Animation Curve Editor (ACE), making it incredibly easy to create and modify animation data directly in your Babylon scene. As with all Babylon.js Platform tools, you can also save your animation data to the Babylon.js Snippet Server and load it back into your Babylon.js scene with one single line of code! See it in action here: Play with the Animation Curve Editor Learn more: Animation Curve Editor Documentation

    Performance Profiler

    Performance is one of the most important things to keep in mind as you create advanced interactive 3D experiences. After all, you don’t want to create an awesome experience that only runs on the most high-end graphics cards, right? You want to create something that EVERYONE can enjoy, and this means keeping track of and optimizing the performance of your scene. Babylon.js 5.0 makes performance debugging and management a breeze with the introduction of the new Performance Profiler. This handy tool allows you to see a real time graph of key performance indicators of your scene, all hooked up live! Make a change, see the impact on perf. It’s really that simple! See it in action here: Performance Profiler Demo Learn more: Performance Profiler Documentation

    GUI Editor Beta

    Babylon.js has a powerful GUI system that offers countless widgets, controls, and properties to help you create rich GUIs. With Babylon.js 5.0 that powerful system becomes far simpler to use with the introduction of the GUI Editor Beta. While still in active development, the GUI Editor Beta is a rich and modern tool, allowing you to create the perfect GUI with a simple and intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Say goodbye to thousands of lines of GUI code and hello to a world of design with the GUI Editor Beta and loading your creations with a single line of code! See it in action here: GUI Editor Beta Demo Try it out for yourself: GUI Editor Learn more: GUI Editor Beta Documentation

    New Node Material Nodes

    The Node Material Editor is one of the most advanced tools available in the Babylon Platform. One simple UI that helps you generate stunning GLSL shaders with ease. With Babylon.js 5.0 the Node Material gets even better with the introduction of several powerful new nodes! Check out the new nodes: Learn More: Node Material Documentation

    Asset Librarian

    The Babylon.js Platform offers a large library of free Creative Commons 0 assets available for you to use in your Babylon.js scenes, completely for free. With Babylon.js 5.0, accessing these assets is easier and faster than ever! The new Asset Librarian brings a new Assets namespace that you can use in your projects to easily access the 200+ free assets to make your Babylon.js scenes soar. Try it out: Asset Librarian Demo Learn More: Asset Librarian Documentation

    Dev Stories Documentation

    Babylon.js 5.0 adds a whole new category of documentation called “Dev Stories.” These new tutorials are designed to walk you, step-by-step, through some common scenarios that many Babylon.js developers ask about. From setting up a Babylon.js project quickly, adding interactive 3D elements to your e-commerce site, to deploying your Babylon.js project to a Native Application, “Dev Stories” are rich, deep, detailed tutorials aimed at helping you take your project from idea to reality! Check It Out: Dev Stories!

    “Going The Distance With Babylon.js” A New Book               

    We are also incredibly excited to share that alongside Babylon.js 5.0, community member and talented author Josh Elster has written an entirely new book about Babylon.js 5.0. Published by Packt Publishing, “Going The Distance With Babylon.js” is written from the mindset of taking you through the entire development process of building a game with Babylon.js from the ground up. We are thrilled to partner with Josh and Packt on this book and think it’ll be a great addition to your library and accelerate your Babylon.js learning journey. Pick Up Your Copy Here: Babylon.js 5.0: The Book Beside the tooling, there are also a ton of new features in the engine itself. Check out part three to learn more about the exciting new improvements with Babylon.js 5.0.]]>         Babylon.js 5.0: Beyond The Stars – Part 1 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/05/05/babylon-js-5-0-beyond-the-stars-part-1/ Thu, 05 May 2022 20:57:30 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56447 Our mission is to create one of the most powerful, simple, and aesthetically pleasing web rendering engines in the world. Fueled by our passion to make it completely open and free for everyone.

    Today is an important milestone for the Babylon.js plat

    The post Babylon.js 5.0: Beyond The Stars – Part 1 appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     WebGPU WebGPU represents the next evolution in browser to GPU communication. The W3C's "GPU for the Web" Community Group built it from the ground up with performance in mind. WebGPU offers web developers access to some of the most advanced modern graphics capabilities such as compute shaders and lightning-fast texture loading. We have been actively participating in the WebGPU working group from its earliest days and are proud to announce that Babylon.js 5.0 offers FULL support for WebGPU. This means that with Babylon.js 5.0 you can develop mind-bending, rendering experiences on the web using both WebGL and WebGPU - you don’t have to learn a new graphics API, Babylon.js takes care of it for you! As WebGPU becomes more broadly available in your favorite browsers later this year, and Babylon.js 5.0 is set up and ready for you to take advantage of this new performance rocket ship! WebGPU Demos (Must use a WebGPU compatible browser): Learn more: WebGPU Documentation

    Cross-platform Native Deployment

    We know developers want to reach as many people as possible with as little effort as possible. We are proud to announce that Babylon.js 5.0 unlocks the ability to use the Babylon.js API to develop web AND native applications. Whether you’re targeting Web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android Phone, Babylon.js 5.0 allows you to write your rendering code once and deploy it across the platforms of your choice, using the browser OR as native applications! Learn More about Babylon.js’s Cross-Platform Capabilities: We know developers want to reach as many people as possible with as little effort as possible. We are proud to announce that Babylon.js 5.0 unlocks the ability to use the Babylon.js API to develop web AND native applications. Whether you’re targeting Web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android Phone, Babylon.js 5.0 allows you to write your rendering code once and deploy it across the platforms of your choice, using the browser OR as native applications! Learn More about Babylon.js’s Cross-Platform Capabilities: Babylon Cross-Platform, Babylon Cross Platform Documentation

    Space Pirates Demo

    What would the Babylon.js 5.0 release be without an appropriately themed demo to go with it? The Babylon Space Pirates Demo is designed to give game developers a tiny glimpse at the amazing possibilities of the Babylon.js Platform. Enough Talk! Let’s Fly! I want to see the code! These are just a few of the signature features but stay tuned, there is much more to come. The next installments of this blog series will dive into more about the exciting new tools that are now available with Babylon.js 5.0.]]>         Windows App SDK Ecosystem Update https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2022/02/11/window-app-sdk-ecosystem-update/ Fri, 11 Feb 2022 21:42:58 +0000 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/?p=56438 On November 16th the Windows App SDK team released version 1.0! It’s the starting point for your ability to build and ship Windows desktop apps with Windows 10 and Windows 11. It includes the ability to use Windows App SDK with a .NET 5+ app, as we

    The post Windows App SDK Ecosystem Update appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.

    ]]>     What is the Windows App SDK? When building an app with Windows App SDK you have access to both modern Windows technologies and new features, while also having access to the power of Desktop Win32. These technologies are decoupled from the OS and ship through NuGet so they can be adopted incrementally across all 1 billion + Windows devices, without having to wait for users to update their OS. With WinAppSDK you are in control of upgrading to new Versions! When building an app with Windows App SDK, you’ll start by installing the developer tools. This provides WinUI 3 project and item templates and sets up your app to reference the Windows App SDK package and any needed dependencies. Then you can create an app with a modern Windows 11 experience using WinUI 3.

    What’s supported in Windows App SDK 1.0?

    Lots of features are available both new and continuing from previous versions! You can find the full release notes here. The team aims to continue putting out regular previews and we’re actively seeking your feedback on each of them.

    Get started with Windows App SDK 1.0

    To start using Windows App SDK, see Get started with Windows App SDK to set up your development environment and learn more about the components included in this release. If you want to jump right in with building your first WinUI 3 desktop app, start with our tutorial!

    A growing ecosystem

    We're excited that the following ecosystem technologies are already supporting Windows App SDK 1.0. These technologies provide unique features and controls to supplement WinUI 3, and you can read more about each of them by following the links below.
    • DevExpress: DevExpress has released 20 new WinUI controls with Windows App SDK 1.0 support, including the Data Grid, Scheduler, Charts, Ribbon Toolbar, WinUI Reporting, and more. All 20 UI components are available free of charge to get started!
    • GrapeCity: ComponentOne WinUI Edition includes a powerful data grid with cell customization and high-performance virtualization, essential calendar and accordion layout controls, fluent styles, and support for desktop (Win32) applications.
    • Infragistics: Ultimate UI for WinUI + Windows App SDK 1.0 bringing business-critical, high-performing, and feature-rich line of business controls to your apps that target any platform that runs Windows (including Windows on ARM64). Preview available now!
    • ArcGIS Runtime SDK for .NET (ESRI): Adds mapping, spatial analytics, and location intelligence capabilities to your apps on Android, iOS, and Windows. Support for WinUI 3 is now available with samples [github.com] to jumpstart your journey today!
    • Uno Platform: Use WinUI 3 – Windows App SDK 1.0, XAML and C# to build pixel-perfect, single-codebase, native applications that can run on Web, Desktop and Mobile. It is free, open-source and available today.
    • Syncfusion: A state-of-the-art WinUI toolkit with 25+ controls including DataGrid, Chart, Scheduler and File Formats libraries (Excel, PDF, Word and PowerPoint). Check out the WinUI Controls page for more details and demos.
    • Telerik UI for WinUI: The market first and biggest (40+) UI components suite for crafting Win32 apps with WinUI 3, comes with feature-rich controls like Scheduler, Ribbon, DataGrid, Charts, Gauges, Barcodes and more. It also provides a bundle of document processing libraries to enable processing the most used document file formats.
    • Windows Community Toolkit (Microsoft): The WCT currently supports Windows App SDK 1.0! It provides tons of new controls and capabilities for use in your WinUI app. You can find out more about using it with WinUI 3 here.

    What’s next?

    In the near term, we plan to release Windows App SDK 1.1 Experimental in the next few weeks and Windows App SDK 1.1 GA in late Q2, with preview releases that will ship alongside these stable releases. Throughout the next calendar year, more technologies will be coming to WinAppSDK, such as multi-window support and push notifications. Staying in the loop You can stay up to date with the team on the Windows App SDK GitHub repo and the and through our monthly WinUI Community Calls where we often share roadmap updates and other exciting news. You can also connect with us on Twitter using #WindowsAppSDK and @WindowsUI. We look forward to seeing the beautiful apps you create with WinAppSDK 1.0 & WinUI 3! Sincerely, Windows App SDK team]]>