Microsoft has released a developer preview of Project Reunion, its initiative aimed at bringing the Windows development environment back to a coherent state.

Of course it might have been better if it had never been turned into an incoherent mess in the first place - but that's a different story.

Microsoft describes Project Reunion as:

"a new set of developer components and tools that represents the next evolution in the Windows app development platform. Project Reunion provides a unified set of APIs and tools that can be used in a consistent way by any desktop app on a broad set of target Windows 10 OS versions."

When we first covered it when Microsoft announced it at Build last year, we thought of it more as an initiative that could repair the long-term damage to the Windows development environment and community caused by the self-inflicted wound that was, and is, UWP, WinRT, and Metro.

The kindest description of the current mess would be that the landscape for developing Windows applications at the moment is incoherent following Microsoft's blind push to make UWP "the" development environment for Windows, ignoring the excellence of .NET. When that didn't work, UWP was sidelined, and Project Reunion was announced with the promise that it would break down the barrier between Win32 and UWP apps. At the time, Microsoft said:

Project Reunion expands this effort to make it easier to build a great Windows app. It will unify access to existing Win32 and UWP APIs and make them available decoupled from the OS, via tools like NuGet. This will provide a common platform for new apps.

Writing about the developer preview on the Microsoft Docs site,  Microsoft says Project Reunion is not meant to replace the Windows SDK. The Windows SDK will continue to work as is, and there are many core components of Windows that will continue to evolve via APIs that are delivered via OS and Windows SDK releases.

However, Microsoft says that Project Reunion will unify access to Windows APIs for all desktop Windows 10 apps. No matter which app model you choose, you will have access to the same set of Windows APIs that are available in Project Reunion. The team says that:

"Over time, we plan to make further investments in Project Reunion that remove more distinctions between the different app models. Project Reunion will include both WinRT APIs and native C APIs."

More Information

Project Reunion On Microsoft Docs Site

Project Reunion On GitHub

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