• Article

Special Windows 10 issue 2015

Volume 30 Number 11

Last Word - Welcome to Windows 10 App Development

By Kevin Gallo | Windows 2015

I hope you are enjoying this special edition of MSDN Magazine focusing on app development for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). I’m Kevin Gallo, vice president of the Developer Platform team within Windows. My team is responsible for creating the UWP, and we’re anxious for you to use it to deliver great UXes and to give us feedback to help us make it better in the future.

One of the best and most satisfying things about creating a platform like the UWP is getting to see the amazing things that people do with it. Your apps and games bring the platform to life and create the experiences that attract, engage and delight users. We mean it when we say that we love developers and their awesome creations, and we look forward to seeing what that you’ll come up with next.

With Windows 10 and the UWP, it’s possible for you to target—with a single app—the wide range of Windows devices. This is possible because the platform has one shared set of APIs, a single set of languages and frameworks, one set of tools, and a unified Windows Store.

This means that your apps can reach a huge audience. That audience includes users of Windows 10 PCs—of which there are nearly 100 million and counting—Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, Windows Phone handsets (coming later in 2015), as well as the Surface Hub, Xbox and HoloLens (coming in 2016) platforms.

With the UWP, it’s easy to use our adaptive controls to make apps look great across a wide range of device types, input methods and screen sizes. You can also tailor your apps to create customized experiences for specific devices, ranging from the smallest IoT sensor to the largest Surface Hub interactive whiteboard and display. That means you can use a single UWP app to target this diverse audience with experiences that are tailored to each device and usage scenario in ways that are the most natural and comfortable for users.

This issue of MSDN Magazine provides an introduction and a practical guide to many of the new and exciting capabilities of the UWP, ranging from design guidance for multiple screens and optimizing communication between apps, to improvements in background processing and multitasking, and more.

For those of you who already have apps on Windows 8.1 or Windows Phone 8.1, I want to emphasize that the UWP is just an evolution of the same modern platform you’ve been using. You can continue to write apps for the Windows platform in your language and using the framework of your choice, whether that’s C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, XAML or Silverlight. You can reuse significant portions of your existing code with minimal effort and then focus your time enhancing the app experience with the unique features of Windows 10.

Beyond this special issue of MSDN Magazine, we offer a trove of online content that we think will be useful to you as a UWP app developer. Here are just a few of the resources you might be interested in checking out:

  • Building Apps for Windows: Our developer blog, with new content added every week (bit.ly/1KZUio1)
  • Build 2015: Session videos and slides from the conference are on the Channel 9 site (bit.ly/1NHlnz7)
  • A Developer’s Guide to Windows 10: An 18-part video series from Microsoft Virtual Academy that teaches with practical examples (bit.ly/1LrDVmM)
  • Windows Dev Center: Downloadable tools, design guidance, how-to guides, plus complete API reference documentation
  • Code and App Samples: Available in a GitHub repository (bit.ly/1RhG46l)

Are you planning to work with the UWP and Windows 10? If so, we’d love to hear your feedback. We rely on developer input to help shape our plans and priorities. Make your voice heard by providing feedback via our Windows Developer User Voice. Go to wpdev.uservoice.com and leave us a suggestion, or vote on the existing suggestions that are important and relevant to you.

I hope you find this issue of MSDN Magazine useful. I can’t wait to see the great things you and the Windows developer community will build with the Universal Windows Platform!

Kevin Gallo is corporate vice president of the Windows Developer Platform at Microsoft and is responsible for designing and shipping the platform components through which developers build meaningful apps and services for the Windows family of devices. Gallo holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Engineering. In his spare time he enjoys biking, hiking and boating with his family.