Week 2 of Gateware: Research

    My big plan for Gateware or the next several months that I was going to be working on was sort of a two-parter. Firstly, I was going to complete the work of previous developers to get Gateware running as a UWP application so that it could run on additional Microsoft devices such as the Xbox, Windows Mixed Reality Headset, Hololens, and so on. Secondly, I wanted to convert the UWP code over to WinUI 3 to future-proof Gateware, as it seemed that Microsoft was dropping support for UWP and replacing it with WinUI 3. The problems arose with this second part, as the previous statement only seems to be partly true.

     From what I can tell, when people are talking about "UWP" in various articles and websites, they seem to be talking about two different things. The first thing they could be talking about is the UWP application framework. This is the overall structure of a project that makes a UWP app a UWP app. The second thing they could be talking about is UWP/XAML. This is a library/language used to create UI elements inside of a UWP application. Up until WinUI 3 came out, UWP/XAML was the only way to create UI elements in UWP apps, and that was really the only use that UWP/XAML had. 

    But now, with the introduction of WinUI 3, Microsoft seems to be trying to replace UWP/XAML (not the UWP application framework) with WinUI 3. But since people have always just used "UWP" to refer to both parts of the UWP ecosystem, this now seems to have created some confusion. Or at least it has really confused me. 

    The main thing to be learned from this is that WinUI 3 only brings about new libraries and API's for creating UI elements, which is something that Gateware does not have/need any time soon. Since Gateware uses graphics API's to draw to the screen, Gateware users can just create UI elements using those API's. Because of this, WinUI 3 has to use being in the current Gateware. I can see it possibly having some use cases in the future, as Gateware has more features added, but until then, there is not really anything to be done.

    Next Wednesday (April 19, 2023), Microsoft will be holding their monthly WinUI 3 Community Call where they has a QnA towards the end. I plan on attending this Community call to try and learn more about WinUI 3 and UWP, just to confirm that WinUI 3 holds no prospects for Gateware in present time.

    In the meantime, I will be working on various fixes that involves Linux and MacOS to not just get more Gateware experience, but to also get some experience in working with those other OS's. I do still plan on completing the UWP work to get Gateware running on Xbox, but that will be after I have confirmed that there is nothing to be done concerning WinUI 3.