Latest Windows 10 SDK with several new platform capabilties now available for download

Microsoft today announced the release of latest Windows SDK that comes with several new platform capabilities. Microsoft first demoed these capabilities at Build 2018 earlier this year.

• Windows UI Library (WinUI) allows you take advantage of the latest Fluent controls and styles for Windows 10 apps without having to wait for all your customers to update to the latest OS version. The WinUI nuget package is backward-compatible, down to Windows 10 version 1607 (Anniversary Update) and includes the same powerful, supported controls that Windows uses in its apps and experiences.
• UWP XAML hosting API (Preview) allows ‘islands’ of UWP XAML UI elements to be hosted in applications built using non-UWP technologies such as Windows Forms, WPF, or C/C++ Win32, eliminating the need to re-write or re-package your application for UWP. We’ve created a set of WPF and WinForms wrappers for common UI elements that developers can use to save time.
• Adaptive Cards 1.1 boosts feature additions such as Media Element and Action Icons and building cards easier with the new visual designer. Adaptive Cards is available in Outlook as Actionable Messages, in Cortana with Skills, and Teams through Azure Bot Service.
• Graph Notifications (Preview) offers an enterprise-compliant, people-centric, and cross-platform notifications platform using Microsoft Graph. The tech preview supports iOS, Android, Windows, and the Graph Explorer.
• Project Ink Analysis allows you to write applications that allow users to draw and express themselves and offers the capabilities to understand/recognize and make the ink more productive. This is the same technology we use to power Office today.
• Hyper-V allows Android developers on Windows to enjoy a fast Android emulator running the latest Android APIs, all on Hyper-V. The minimum requirements to run this are Windows 10 version 1803 on an x86 based machine and Visual Studio v15.8 for IDE support.
• It’s easier to start using the new Windows Machine Learning API, as it’s the same for both Win32 and UWP applications. New capabilities include: support for ONNX v1.2.2 models, converting FP32 datatypes in ONNX models to use FP16, support for Windows Server 2019, and improved evaluation times on the CPU and GPU.

This updated Windows SDK is part of Visual Studio 15.9 release. This new VS release also comes with several new features, read about them below.

• You can now import and export an installation configuration file that specifies which workloads and components should be installed with an instance of Visual Studio.
• We have improved the debugging experience for NuGet packages using the new symbol package format (.snupkg).
• Step back in debugger is now available in C++ for Enterprise customers.
• C++ IntelliSense now responds to changes in the remote environment for both CMake and MSBuild projects targeting Linux.
• We have made updates to UWP Desktop Bridge framework packages and added support for ARM64 C++ Native Desktop scenarios.
• We added support for the range-v3 library with the MSVC 15.9 compiler.
• We fixed several bugs in the F# compiler and F# tools.
• Language service support for new TypeScript features for semantic file renaming and project references.
• Improved Node.js development by updating Vue.js templates and adding support for unit testing using the Jest framework.
• We added SharePoint 2019 project templates, so you can migrate existing SharePoint 2013 and 2016 projects to SharePoint 2019.
• Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin now supports Xcode 10.
• We made improvements to the Xamarin.Android build performance.
• We have added and improved features for Universal Windows Platform developers, including ARM64 support, the latest preview SDK, better debugging of Desktop Bridge applications, and XAML Designer improvements.
• Substantial improvements were made to the experience of using authenticated package feeds.
• There is now support for lock file to enable repeatable restore for PackageReference based projects.
• We have added support for the new license format for NuGet packages.
• We have introduced NuGet client policies in Visual Studio which enables you to lock down environments such that only trusted packages can be installed.
• We made the use of .NET Core within Visual Studio more predictable.

Source: Microsoft