Did widget support get pushed back?

[riverar]

At the last WinUI Community Call, it was mentioned that Windows App SDK 1.2 was targeting the ability to create Widgets for Windows 11. (I understand targeting to mean no guarantees.) Given that Windows App SDK 1.2 Preview 1 has now been released, and preview releases are supposed to represent everything that will ship in the subsequent release, does this mean Widget support has been pushed to 2023/WinAppSDK 1.3?

[DarranRowe]

They have prior form in things appearing later in the previews. If you look at the previous preview releases, you'll notice that some features were added in preview 2 and preview 3. As an example, IIRC, the ability to run Windows App SDK applications unpackaged didn't come until 1.0 preview 2 or 3.
This happens quite a lot in other products too. As an example, for quite a while with Visual Studio, the major C++ changes normally came with preview 2. Even now, the STL changelog on GitHub has 17.4 preview 2 adding two C++23 library features and preview 3 adding 13 C++23 library features. So no, I would say that the previews aren't meant to fully represent the subsequent release. They are more like giving you a chance to preview the current work.

[riverar]

That's not quite what we voted on as a community (#637). We voted on a plan where features would start their lives in the experimental (long-lead) channel and get promoted during development into the preview (next-release) and stable channels, with various quality control gates in place to protect the channels. (See "Bars for moving across a release channel".) This release cadence/plan allows developers (us) to see exactly what's in the pipeline and plan accordingly.

The bar, per doc, for the preview channel is:

• Feature will almost certainly be included in the next GA release (it's always possible we have to pull something last minute, but that should be the rare exception)
• Near-stable API (few changes should be happening now)
• Functionality and stability is ~97% there, just ironing out final small bugs.
• Docs ready to be updated to indicate feature is now in next release. Docs are a bit more polished.

So given that we haven't seen Widgets in experimental or preview thus far, I can't imagine a future preview release coming out that doesn't violate the above rules. (Or is Microsoft really going to argue here that dropping a whole new feature, that skipped experimental, is a small change?)

It looks like Microsoft has abandoned some of these plans and is instead working on long-lead releases in a private repository with a "looks good to us" gate for the preview channel.

[DarranRowe]

Well, they have already violated those above rules with 1.2.
This entire namespace wasn't in the experimental release.
This entire namespace wasn't in the experimental release.
What's more the MediaPlayerElement and MediaTransportControls classes were not in the experimental release.
What's more, as already mentioned, they have also previously violated those rules. Mica/Desktop Acrylic came in a preview 3. Unpackaged application support came in a preview 2 or 3 for x86 and x64 where the arm64 support came in the corresponding stable. Heck multiple windows on the same thread came in a servicing release. 1.1 didn't even have an experimental release.
So, I would honestly say that they didn't even follow those plans in the first place.