WinUI is the native UI platform for Windows 10. This document outlines the prospective roadmap for WinUI through 2019 and into 2020. WinUI is under active development by the Microsoft developer platform team and the roadmap will continue to evolve based on market changes and customer feedback, so please note that the plans outlined here aren't exhaustive or guaranteed. We're also working with the Uno platform so that developers can bring their WinUI code anywhere WebAssembly runs – including Windows 7. We welcome your feedback on the roadmap: please feel free to contribute to existing issues or file a new issue.
For a concise look at the team's plans for 2020 and 2021, see this section .
The WinUI team has two major efforts underway:
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WinUI 2: a library of new and updated controls, styles, and features for UWP apps
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WinUI 3: an expansion of WinUI 2 into a full-fledged UX framework, complete with modern UI components to use in Win32 or UWP apps.
The next release of WinUI 2 will be WinUI 2.5, ETA Q3 2020.
2.5 will be an incremental release that includes new WinUI Xaml features and fixes for UWP apps on Windows 10. You can find a list of currently planned work in the WinUI 2.5 milestone.
For installation instructions see Getting started with the Windows UI Library.
Conceptual overview of WinUI 2 for UWP apps:
WinUI 2 will eventually be superseded by WinUI 3. WinUI 3 will include all the controls and features in WinUI 2.
WinUI 3 will greatly expand the scope of WinUI to include the full Windows 10 native UI platform, which will now be fully decoupled from the UWP SDK.
We're focused on enabling three main use cases:
- Modernizing existing Win32 apps
- Enabling you to extend existing Win32 (WPF, WinForms, MFC..) apps with modern Windows 10 UI at your own pace using the upcoming latest version of Xaml Islands
- Creating new Windows apps
- Enabling you to easily create new modern Windows apps "à la carte" with your choice of app model (Win32 or UWP) and language (.NET or C++)
- Enabling other frameworks
- Providing the native implementation for other frameworks like React Native when running on Windows
The team recently released WinUI 3 Preview 1, which is an early pre-release that includes support for Win32 and UWP apps. Preview 1 is available for anyone to try out, but note that it has limitations and known issues, so it is not equipped for production apps. Get started or read more about Preview 1 here:
WinUI 3.0 Preview 1 (May 2020)
Conceptual overview of WinUI 3:
You can watch the Build 2020 conference session Everything you need to know about WinUI for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZBMHFoMVAs
The existing UWP Xaml APIs that ship as part of the OS will no longer receive new feature updates. They will still receive security updates and critical fixes according to the Windows 10 support lifecycle.
The Universal Windows Platform contains more than just the Xaml framework (e.g. application and security model, media pipeline, Xbox and Windows 10 shell integrations, broad device support) and will continue to evolve. All new Xaml features will just be developed and ship as part of WinUI instead.
WinUI 3 will provide a number of benefits compared to the current UWP Xaml framework, WPF, WinForms and MFC, which will make WinUI the best way to create user interfaces for Windows apps:
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The native UI platform of Windows
WinUI is the highly-optimized native UI platform used to create Windows itself, now made more broadly available for all developers to use to reach Windows. It's a thoroughly tested and proven UI platform that powers the operating system environment and essential experiences of 800+ million Windows 10 PC, XBox One, HoloLens, Surface Hub and other devices. -
The latest Fluent Design
WinUI is Microsoft's main focus for native, accessible Windows UI and controls and is the definitive source for the Fluent Design System on Windows.
It will also support the latest lower-level composition and rendering innovations like vector animations, effects, shadows and lighting. -
Easier "à la carte" desktop development
WinUI 3 will let you more easily mix and match the right combination of:- Language: C# (.NET), C++
- App model: UWP, Win32
- Packaging: MSIX, AppX for the Microsoft Store, unpackaged
- Interop: use WinUI 3 to extend existing WPF, WinForms and MFC apps with modern Fluent UI
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Backward compatibility for new features
New WinUI features will continue to be backward-compatible with a wide range of Windows 10 versions: you can start building and shipping apps with new features immediately as soon as they're released, without having to wait for your users to update Windows. -
Native development support
WinUI can be used with .NET, but doesn't depend on .NET: WinUI is 100% C++ and can be used in unmanaged Windows apps, for example using standard C++17 via C++/WinRT. -
More frequent updates
WinUI will continue to ship new stable versions 3x per year, with monthly prerelease builds. -
Open source development and community engagement
WinUI will continue to be developed as an open source project on GitHub. WinUI 2 is already open source in this repo, and we plan to add the full WinUI 3 Xaml framework into this repo in the coming months.
You can engage directly with Microsoft's core engineering team and contribute bug reports, feature ideas, and even code: see the Contribution Guide for more info.
You can also try out the monthly prerelease builds to see new in-development features and help shape their final form. -
A native Windows target for web and cross-platform frameworks
WinUI 3 is better optimized for libraries and frameworks to build on.
For example, the new high-performance C++ React Native Windows implementation is currently working on using WinUI 3 as its base.
Our primary focus for WinUI 3.0 is to decouple the UWP UI framework (Xaml, composition and input) while maintaining high compatibility with existing UWP APIs and behaviors to help make the update to WinUI 3.0 easy.
This means we won't be adding many new features in the first WinUI 3.0 release.
However, we are planning at least a few new features, including:
- Downlevel support (backward compatibility) for all existing features: new Xaml and Composition features that were added in the Windows May 2019 Update will now work on Creators Update (a.k.a. 15063 or RS2) and newer!
- A new Microsoft Edge (Chromium) WebView2 Xaml control
- Input validation support
- New Visual Studio 2019 project templates for different combinations of app type (Win32, UWP) and language (.NET, C++)
Creating a new WinUI app will be easy using the new Visual Studio 2019 project templates.
It should also be straightforward to add WinUI components to existing Win32 apps using Xaml Islands.
For existing UWP Xaml apps there will be some updates required when migrating to WinUI 3.0.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on the developer experience in the WinUI 3.0 tooling discussion issue.
We're planning to release WinUI 3 via a series of preview releases throughout 2020, with a production-ready preview in November. We expect WinUI 3.0 to ship to market in early 2021.
You can download WinUI 3 Preview 1 to try out - we'd love feedback on it, although please note it's a early preview build with lots of missing features. For installation info and known issues see:
WinUI 3.0 Preview 1 (May 2020)
See the image below for a more detailed look at our plans for getting WinUI 3.0 to market:
