WinUI 3 desktop support?

[watsonwelch]

Hello! This is a really interesting project. What are your thoughts on WinUI 3 desktop (Win32) support? I know many of your existing abstractions (Win2D, SkiaSharp, etc.) have various challenges associated with WinUI 3. Thanks for your consideration!

[charlesroddie]

What are the challenges @watsonwelch ? How could WinUI possibly not support SharpDX, Win2D, and SkiaSharp?

[watsonwelch]

Thanks for the reply! The challenges as I understand them are:

• SharpDX stop being maintained in 2019 so it's unclear if it's still safe to be used as a dependency (.NET 5 isn't listed as an officially supported platform, for example).
• When I wrote the question it was unclear if Win2D was going to be officially supported on WinUI 3 for desktop (Win32) since it's historically been UWP-only — however it looks like Win2D for WinUI 3 desktop support was just released a couple days ago, so this would presumably be the most obvious path.
• SkiaSharp support for WinUI 3 I believe is in development but not yet released, and the maintainer mentions on this thread that "GPU support is not working though because ANGLE does not support WinUI yet"

[charlesroddie]

Great thanks for the additional info. I think Win2D will be the natural choice.