Demote *-uwp to community.

[BillyONeal]

• UWP seems de-emphasized in VS2026.
  • The installer no longer has buttons to turn on UWP workloads [1]
• In our metrics all UWP customers combined are fewer customers than arm-linux.
• UWP is the configuration that seems to cause the most problems for port authors.

[1]:

[Sergio0694]

"UWP seems removed in VS2026"

Just to clarify, UWP is still present and fully supported, it's just that the option has been moved under the WinUI workload. There's a "Universal Windows Platform Tools" additional component there that when checked will install the additional tooling, project templates, etc. We even actually just added support for modern .NET to UWP C# apps, and updated all UWP project templates in VS2026 to use .NET 10 and Native AOT out of the box. UWP will also get full support of CsWinRT 3.0 when it ships.

I know these changes are just for the vcpkg toolchain, but wanted to clarify the state of UWP as a whole in VS 🙂

[sylveon]

The UWP tooling is still available, under "WinUI application development". In fact this is the old UWP workload but renamed (it's still identified under the hood as Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.Universal)

[ahmed605]

UWP was not removed in VS 2026, it just became an Individual Component instead of a workload, but it's still there (and all UWP project templates are also still there)

[BillyONeal]

Thanks, I removed the note about looks officially removed but I still think we should demote it. My boss @MahmoudGSaleh is double checking some things before we would actually merge this.

[BillyONeal]

If we take this also fixes the outstanding comment against #49741

[AenBleidd]

@Sergio0694, just curios: you are saying UWP is still supported, however this article told the opposite, and on Wikipedia it's said that UWP is deprecated.
So what is the truth and the current state of it?

[BillyONeal]

@Sergio0694, just curios: you are saying UWP is still supported, however this article told the opposite, and on Wikipedia it's said that UWP is deprecated. So what is the truth and the current state of it?

The Wikipedia page just links to that 'developer-tech.com' page which is not an official statement by Microsoft.

[Sergio0694]

@AenBleidd there's a lot of confusion and misinformation around UWP, unfortunately it's always been that way 🥲

The truth is what I said before:

• UWP is fully supported for production
• There are no plans to deprecate UWP (Microsoft doesn't really deprecate APIs almost ever)
• UWP support has built-in tooling and templates in VS2026
• UWP fully supports .NET 10 and will continue to support future .NET releases

I think most of the confusion is due to the fact that UWP is not recommended for new Windows apps (which is also true).

[BillyONeal]

I think most of the confusion is due to the fact that UWP is not recommended for new Windows apps (which is also true).

For what it's worth, that is what "deprecate" means to a lot of people, which is probably where the confusion lies.

Microsoft seems to only use the word "deprecate" if they intend to actively remove something, whereas it seems much more likely the UWP stuff gets frozen in a block of ice forever.

[AenBleidd]

@Sergio0694, thank you for the clarification! This really explains a lot.

[BillyONeal]

/azp run

[azure-pipelines]

Azure Pipelines successfully started running 1 pipeline(s).

[MahmoudGSaleh]

Looks good

[BillyONeal]

I merged through the x64-linux baseline issue.