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July 15, 2020
PC

Announcing WinUI 3 Preview 2

At our monthly community call this morning we announced that a new preview of WinUI 3 is ready for you all to try out – WinUI 3 Preview 2! If you’re too excited to read ahead, check out the release notes here.

WinUI 3 Preview 2 was a quality and stability-driven release. It builds directly on Preview 1 by fixing quite a few critical and serious bugs that didn’t make the cut in time for our release at Build 2020 two months ago. The team wanted to put together a small release post-Build to make sure that WinUI 3 is stable and easy to use for everyone. Our community dove right into using Preview 1 and you all provided us with tons of valuable feedback, specifically regarding the critical bugs that you found. This feedback, in addition to the team’s known issues from Preview 1, drove us towards creating the long list of bugs that we set out to fix for this release.

Some notable additions and fixes in this release include:

  • INotifyCollectionChangedand INotifyPropertyChanged are now working in C# Desktop apps
  • WinUI 3 Preview 2 is now compatible with .NET 5 Preview 5 for Desktop apps
  • Point, Rect, and Size members are now Double-typed in the C# projection of the APIs for Desktop apps
  • Crash fixes for Input Validation and other text scenarios

You can see the exhaustive list of bugs fixed in our release notes.

Preview 2 is logistically set up the same way as Preview 1. You’ll have to download a new .VSIX file, make sure you’ve upgraded to .NET 5 Preview 5, and install a new NuGet package. Step-by-step instructions can be found here for Desktop apps and here for UWP apps. You can also test out WinUI 3 Preview 2 without writing any code – just clone and build the Preview 2 branch of the XAML Controls Gallery and navigate through the app to see how the controls are all working with the new fixes put in place.

Preview 2 is not yet ready for use in production apps and we will be continuing to listen to customer feedback and trying to improve your experience throughout subsequent releases. We have a list of our known limitations here and you can also file issues on our GitHub repository for anything new that you run into.

Up next for the team is getting Preview 3 ready for this fall! Preview 3 is going to be a fun and exciting release – it’ll be packed with new features and capabilities! We hope you enjoy experimenting with Preview 2 and are as excited for WinUI to continue evolving as we are.

Ana Wishnoff
Program Manager for WinUI

You can find me on…
Github: @anawishnoff
Twitter: @ana_wishnoff

Tags:
WinUI
XAML