Comment by themacguffinman
8 years ago
Why MS didn't create a UWP emulator or wrapper for Windows 7 is beyond me. No Windows 7 compatibility is the main reason my company isn't bothering with UWP for our desktop software.
8 years ago
Why MS didn't create a UWP emulator or wrapper for Windows 7 is beyond me. No Windows 7 compatibility is the main reason my company isn't bothering with UWP for our desktop software.
It's the same problem that you have, isn't it? You don't want to support two codebases, you just want to build your app once and have it run in two places. It costs time and development budget to maintain two different codebases, and you have to prioritize. Can you really blame Microsoft that they don't want to maintain both a modern codebase and a completely separate fork/back-port of it for a much older branch?
That said, it has been possible to share a lot of code (if not almost all of it) between a WPF and UWP app for a while now with PCLs, or after that targeting .NET Standard. That gets even easier once UWP support for .NET Standard 2.0 ships soonish. There's also been work recently on Xamarin.WPF for Xamarin's cross-platform code sharing, and the XAML Standard 1.0 work trying to converge much of the XAML across all the platforms Xamarin supports and UWP to get rid of a some of the dialectal nuances.
Maybe because Windows 7 lacks the sandbox features required?
That's a good argument for not having the app store on Win7, but APIs are a separate matter. If UWP API could be used to write something that is both a store app on Win10, but can also be deployed (let's say, in a manner similar to Electron apps, with the runtime packaged with the app) on Win7, I think we'd see a lot more of them. Even if you had to build it separately, so long as most of UI code could be shared, it's a boon.
As it is, it's easier to just target WPF.
All new APIs introduced since Windows 8 are mostly UWP ones, so basically you are asking for implementing Windows 10 on top Windows 7 kernel.
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