WinRT - WinUI3

[MattyD]

Thank you as always!

2 hours ago, WildByDesign said:

What happens in the case of version mismatches between the bootstrapper DLL and the Windows App SDK that a user has on their machine?

I think it should be OK. It'll just try to load a requested runtime version - and it'll either succeed or fail. 

A few posts back, we found MddBootstrapInitialize2 reported success when the installed runtime differed from what we requested,  but the runtime didn't actually initialize.  So in response to that,  _WinUI3_Startup() now attempts to retrieve a version number to verify all is OK before returning success.

By memory, loading the "2.0 experimental3" version worked fine with our current bootstrapper, so I don't think its critical to keep this dll up to date.  But it might be worth double checking I guess. Either way I'll keep the dll up to date in the WinRT releases.

Also - the default runtime version that _WinUI3_Startup() targets is static, and that will change depending on the WinRT release.  This is because all our WinUI3 libraries are generated from one WinAPPSDK version, and so _WinUI3_Startup is setup to target that.  I'll pop an announcement up whenever the default version changes (I'll probably release whenever a new stable SDK drops), but there's certainly no plans to support parallel versions of the SDK!!!

3 hours ago, WildByDesign said:

. I've never fully understood where (or when) end users get updates to the Windows App SDK platform.

yeah generally end users don't. It's our responsibility as developers to distribute the runtime along with our software. (Multiple versions can co-exist).

This is probably worth a read around distribution, if we ever make it that far!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-app-sdk/deploy-unpackaged-apps

3 hours ago, WildByDesign said:

I feel like it's kind of unfortunate that MS doesn't store that bootstrapper DLL anywhere on a user's machine

yeah, a decision was made obviously made at some point to decouple the WinUI stuff from the OS. So lucky us I guess!