WinUI 3: Preview 3 now available with ARM64, drag and drop support and more

Microsoft today announced the release of WinUI 3.0 Preview 3.

WinUI 3 is a UI layer that takes the decoupled UWP XAML Visual Layer, the WinUI 2 library, and combines it with more modern features and capabilities. This layer can be used in any Desktop app or UWP app.

Microsoft has been hard at work on Preview 3 since the release of Preview 2 back in July. The update includes countless bug fixes, interesting new capabilities, and improvements on existing capabilities.

 Here are some highlights from Preview 3 that are new since Preview 2:

New Features

• ARM64 Support
• Drag and drop inside and outside of apps
• RenderTargetBitmap (only XAML content for now – SwapChainPanel content will be captured later)
• Improvements to our tooling/developer experience:
  • Live Visual Tree, Hot Reload, Live Property Explorer and similar tools
  • Intellisense now working for WinUI 3
• MRT Core Integration – making apps faster and lighter on startup and providing quicker resource lookup
• Custom cursor support
• Off-thread input APIs

The full release notes and installation instructions can be found here.

The changes continue to advance the capabilities of WinUI 3 for supporting heavy-duty, complex apps.

Since this is a preview release, it is not completely bug-free. A list of known issues and limitations can be found here.

Bugs and feature requests can be posted by opening an issue on the GitHub repo here.  Updates on post-Preview 3 planning and features will be posted on the WinUI 3 feature roadmap.