Microsoft took the wrapper off Windows 11 yesterday in a virtual event. That event was largely consumer focused, highlighting a new design, Widgets, and even the Microsoft Teams Chat app is as much cool feature as productivity tool. However, later in the day, Microsoft held a Windows 11 event for developers.
This separate event showed that the company is looking at developers and enterprise as well as consumers and home workers.
We already seen the changes Microsoft has made to the Microsoft Store, including support for Android apps. Microsoft also touched on making the Store easier for developers. developers will now be able to submit unpackaged Win32 apps to the store, for example raw .exe builds. In a bold move clearly aimed at enticing developers, Microsoft says apps no longer need to be hosted on the Microsoft Store.
In other words, developers can use their own content delivery networks. Also for dev's, it is now possible to use third-party commerce tools. Microsoft says these developers can keep 100% of the revenue they get from their apps.
Developer Tools
Later in the day, Microsoft expanded on these details. The Store now has a new Stories feature and even a store that pops app to make it easier for users to install applications. Microsoft also debuted a feature called PWABuilder 3. As you can probably guess, this makes it easy to build progressive web apps (PWA) in just a few minutes.
Elsewhere, Windows 11 has WebView 2 runtime, which makes the creation of hybrid apps easier through Microsoft Edge.
Another announcement was Windows App SDK, which was previously known as Project Reunion. This allows developers to add Windows 11 tools directly into their apps. Microsoft has launched version 0.8 of the SDK to give developers a head start on creating for Windows 11 before it launches in the fall.
Tip of the day: File History is a Windows 10 back up feature that saves each version of files in the Documents, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, and Offline OneDrive folders. Though its name implies a primary focus on version control, you can actually use it as a fully-fledged backup tool for your important documents.
