News

Microsoft Touts Dev Partners in Project Reunion Release

• By David Ramel
• March 31, 2021

Microsoft this week talked up "ecosystem technologies" that support Project Reunion 0.5, the latest release of its Windows application development toolset.

As reported on sister site VisualStudioMagazine, Microsoft's Project Reunion "is meant to address difficulty in Windows desktop app development in part by bridging two disparate Windows desktop development schemes that have arisen: Win32 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP)." Version 0.5, released this week, is notable for having "tooling for WinUI 3 desktop applications that are forward-compatible with future releases."

In its announcement of Project Reunion 0.5, Microsoft touted several developer partners that have integrated (or plan to integrate) support for the release in their products, including Actipro Software, DevExpress, GrapeCity, Infragistics, Syncfusion, Telerik UI for WinUI and Uno Platform.

"We're excited that the following ecosystem technologies are either already supporting or working on supporting Project Reunion 0.5," wrote Microsoft group program manager Andrew Clinick. "These technologies provide unique features and controls to supplement WinUI 3."

Clinick summarized each of the partners' efforts around Project Reunion 0.5 as follows:

• Actipro Software is migrating their vast UI control offerings over to WinUI 3, including their SyntaxEditor code editor, propertygrid, native type edit boxes, docking/MDI, charts, and more.
• DevExpress: DevExpress has released 20 new WinUI controls with Project Reunion 0.5 support, including the Data Grid, Scheduler, Charts, Ribbon Toolbar, and more. All 20 UI components are available free-of-charge.
• GrapeCity plans to bring their popular desktop UI controls to WinUI later this year! Learn more about their data connection service components for WinUI.
• Infragistics: Ultimate UI for WinUI brings 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).
• Syncfusion: Updated their projects to Microsoft.ProjectReunion from Microsoft.WinUI following upgrade instructions. All their controls are working fine.
• Telerik UI for WinUI: the market first UI controls suite for crafting Win32 and UWP apps with WinUI 3, comes with feature-rich controls like Ribbon, DataGrid, Charts, Gauges, Barcode, and more.
• Uno Platform: Use WinUI 3 – Reunion 0.5, 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.

More technologies will be coming to Project Reunion this year, according to Microsoft, including:

• App Lifecycle for improved system performance and battery life.
• A modern Windowing system that combines the power of Win32 windowing with the ease of UWP.
• Notifications support for both local and push scenarios.
• Unpackaged app support (unpackaged desktop apps include WPF, WinForms, Win32 or console, not using the MSIX app package format).

"In the near term, we plan to release Project Reunion 0.8 in the next few months and Project Reunion 1.0 later this year, with a series of preview releases that will ship alongside these stable releases," Clinick said.