Today, Microsoft is releasing the third preview of WinUI 3, and among the new features is native support for ARM64 PCs. If you"re not familiar with WinUI, you might remember it from Microsoft"s Build conference this year when the company announced Project Reunion. This is part of the firm"s plan to bring Win32 and UWP together, and do so without requiring a feature update to Windows 10.
Here"s a high-level list of new features in Preview 3:
- ARM64 Support
- Drag and drop inside and outside of apps
- RenderTargetBitmap (only XAML content for now – SwapChainPanel content will be captured later)
- Improvements to our tooling/developer experience:
- Live Visual Tree, Hot Reload, Live Property Explorer and similar tools
- Intellisense now working for WinUI 3
- MRT Core Integration – making apps faster and lighter on startup and providing quicker resource lookup
- Custom cursor support
- Off-thread input APIs
In order to use the new preview, you"ll need to be on Visual Studio 16.9, which is a newer version than the one required for Preview 2. This version will also automatically give you .NET 5. Microsoft says that you should really start a new project with Preview 3, rather than attempting to upgrade a project, but there is a guide for upgrading apps here.
For more detailed documentation on WinUI 3 Preview 3, you can find that here.