C++/WinRT

Introduction

This repo house samples I've developed for familiarising myself with C++/WinRT. C++/WinRT is a modern C++ language projection over the Windows Runtime APIs.

Building

You need Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ and the Universal Windows Platform development workloads installed. Make sure the C++/WinRT option under SDKs, libraries, and frameworks in Visual Studio Installer is selected. You should then be able to open and build the cpp-winrt.sln file in Visual Studio.

Observed issues

C++/WinRT lacks C++20 module support. It's unclear at this point when or even if this will be added. It is possible to consume C++/WinRT by stuffing it into and re-exporting it from a module, but I found that this doesn't play well with client code that consumes the standard module std (redefinition bug). A possible workaround for this is to hide C++/WinRT behind wrapper functions and classes for only the functionality you actually need rather than consume it directly in client code. This is probably a good idea in most cases, as it means your codebase avoids a direct dependency on third-party code and those wrapper functions and classes can theoretically be updated to use a different implementation in the future without changing the client code.

Samples

• json: shows basic JSON manipulation;
• message-websocket-client: a websocket client that echoes out to the echo.websocket.events service;
• message-websocket-server: work-in-progress, not yet implemented;
• stream-websocket-client: a TCP stream socket client that works with stream-websocket-server;
• stream-websocket-server: a TCP stream socket server that works with stream-websocket-client;
• syndication: basic syndication sample provided by MSDN.
• hello-world: Universal Windows MSDN sample.
• http-client: demonstrates use of the HttpClient class.

Additional Resources

• C++/WinRT on MSDN