Mac is finally behind me (for now), and UWP and Windows lie ahead! The first task that stood before me was bringing the UWP branch that Chase Richards and Lam Truong had worked on and merging the main branch into it to begin the updating process. This, of course, led to several conflicts that needed to be sorted out. Luckily, TotoiseGit has a really nice GUI that's good for sorting out conflicts and letting you edit the files outside of the conflicting areas as well. So after getting all of those conflicts sorted out, the Win32 version, of course, still wouldn't compile. But it turned out that all that was needed was changing some file pathing since UWP required some different folder structuring. And within the first day and a half, I had the Desktop version of Gateware compiling and passing all of the tests.
But the Win32 version is only half the battle; now it was on to the UWP. And surprisingly, it wasn't that bad. The only thing that really gave issues was the UWP implementation of GFile, but to fix that, I really just had to copy-paste some code from the Win32 implementation of GFile. So I was actually able to get the UWP compiling and passing all the tests in the same day I was able to finish the Win32 implementation. Man, only two days in, and I'm flying through this! This UWP stuff is gonna be a breeze!
That's what I thought at the end of the second day; now, here I am at the end of day 5, and, on the surface, nothing has happened since then. First, allow me to set the stage as to what is halting progress.
As I mentioned before, UWP requires some very different folder structuring since it needs one solution for Win32 and another for the UWP. Now for a human being with an ever-changing brain, this is no problem. But for a machine that is running off of a specific set of commands, looking for a specific set of folders and files, this can be a huge issue. And it just so happens that the runners that we use to test the different implementations of Gateware are that kind of machine. So, until we can find a way to get those runners to recognize this different folder structure, the UWP branch cannot pass the pipeline tests and, therefore, cannot be merged into the main branch.
But this is only the first problem. The second problem has to do with the Windows SDK versions (just as a heads up, I am in Windows 11 throughout this entire process). So to develop a UWP application, you need to download the UWP development tool through Visual Studio. When you install the UWP tool, it also installs Windows 11 SDK 10.0.22000.0, which is an SDK for Windows 11. If you try to delete this SDK, it will also delete the UWP tool, no matter what. So there is no way to have the UWP tool, without this version of the Windows SDK. Also, an additional piece of information to keep in mind; you cannot use a Windows 11 SDK while running Windows 10.
Well this is all cool and all, but what does this have to do with Gateware? Well, when CMake is run, it has to create a UWP project, and a UWP project requires a Windows SDK version. But CMake can't just give it a random version, so it finds the latest version that you have installed and uses that in the project settings. And now, you suddenly have a UWP project that is targeting Windows 11, even if you're on Windows 10. Now, if you're a human being with an ever-changing brain, you can simply just go into the project properties and change the platform version to a Windows 10 SDK that you have installed, granted that would get very annoying since you'd have to do that every time you ran CMake. But, once again, our runners are not humans being with an ever-changing brain and can't just change the platform version as they wish.
So Lari and I began trying to find a way to get CMake to find the Windows SDK version you had installed that was both older than the current OS version you were running and the newest out of that whole bunch. But after two whole days, we could not find a strong and reliable way to do it without creating more work for the user. So we came to the final solution. Just use Windows 11. While it will still be possible to use Gateware UWP on Windows 10, there will be hoops that will be needed to be jumped through, so it will be recommended to just use Windows 11. As I am typing this right now, I am using a freshly installed Windows 11, and we are currently looking into updating the Windows runner to Windows 11.
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