Microsoft is making improvements to Windows on ARM developer tooling

Microsoft arrived with massive announcements this week for Copilot, its AI-powered assistant tool. Besides launching the Copilot+ PCs, folks over at the Redmond tech giant are also improving the Windows on ARM experience, which, this time, includes developer tooling.

Basically, you get updates for Visual Studio, .NET, and other important tools to create Arm-native versions of desktop applications. Microsoft says, “Windows is continuing to welcome more third-party Windows apps, middleware partners and Open-Source Software natively to Arm.”

And to support that, Visual Studio, Microsoft IDE to develop apps, will soon get an Arm-native SQL Server Developer Tools. The support finally arrived due to popular demand, and as for .NET, Microsoft’s open-source developer platform, it will soon get a lot of performance improvements for the latest .NET 8 that just came out back in November 2023.

Besides, Unity will also ship its games editor to the market within the next update so you can build, test, and run Unity games for Windows devices with Arm. And if you use Blender, the best part is that its native builds for Arm are now available for preview and the official launch is expected to arrive in June. 

Windows App SDK, Microsoft’s one-stop software dev kit, also gets native Maps control and the latest .NET 8 within version 1.5+. The former is powered by WebView 2 and Azure Maps. Popular tools on Windows 11 like File Explorer and Photos, for example, have also been migrated to WinUI3 for a better, much more efficient user interface.

“With the latest updates to WPF, we have made it easier than ever to modernize the look and feel of your app through support for Windows 11 theming,” Microsoft further says.