How to handle Windows 2019 GH Actions runners deprecation

[stephengtuggy]

The Windows 2019 GitHub Actions runners are going away on June 30th. See actions/runner-images#12045

What should we do about this? After this change, it will be harder to build binaries for Windows 10, most likely. How should we handle that?

[BenjamenMeyer]

I propose we simply drop the Win2019 runners.

As to Win10 support; there's a series of Defines that control the version of Windows an application is built for. We just need to ensure we have those set properly. It's been a while since I've set this up, but this should be a good starting point:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/modifying-winver-and-win32-winnt?view=msvc-170

[stephengtuggy]

I am already defining those macros to 0x0A00. So I guess we're good to go then?

[stephengtuggy]

What about the system DLLs that we pull in for the installers?

[BenjamenMeyer]

I am already defining those macros to 0x0A00. So I guess we're good to go then?

yes that should be fine. There are some macros we could use to be more explicit on the version since MS did give the values names. But either way, that's how we control it. The values really shouldn't change so doing that shouldn't be an issue as long as we document the version we're targeting too.

What about the system DLLs that we pull in for the installers?

We really should be pulling those in through a MSI Dependency package so that if they're installed already we get them and if not they'll get installed for us. We may have some work to do there, but I would think that the backwards compatibility should work, but could be wrong - they've changed a lot of that since WinSXS was introduced with Vista, so the binaries might be less backwards compatible than they were before that. (I know...a long time ago...)