Microsoft has released the version 0.1 preview of Project Reunion[1], its set of software tools to help developers bridge the gap between the interfaces for legacy Win32 apps and new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) interfaces.
Microsoft announced Project Reunion at its Build 2020 conference this May[2] as an application protocol interface (API) that marries Win32 and UWP.
It's been almost a decade since Microsoft promised developers the ability to run legacy and modern UWP apps on Windows, starting with Windows 8 in Microsoft's first shot against Apple's iPad and the then new world of touch-enabled tablets and its subsequent Windows 10 convertible laptops.
Project Reunion builds on Microsoft changing the name of the Win32 API to the Windows API, and then rolling that API into the UWP API, so developers can add modern features to desktop apps.
The initial releases from Project Reunion[3] included previews of the WinUi 3 UI framework for Windows 10 and WebView 2 for bring web content into an app. They're both open-source libraries that developers can bring to their own code.
Microsoft's ambition is to give Windows 10 developers libraries so they can target all the one billion Windows 10 PCs rather than just the devices on the latest Windows 10 builds.
However, a lot has changed even since the release of the first building blocks of Project Reunion. Apple now has its first Arm-based silicon M1 Mac computers that run iOS and macOS apps.
These machines are beating the performance of Windows on Arm hardware, such as Microsoft's Surface Pro X[4], which uses a chip co-developed by Qualcomm and Microsoft. Apple is already building successors to M1 that are aimed at outperforming Intel's higher-end processors[5].
Microsoft's Project Reunion