Announced at this year’s Build conference, Project Westminster is one of four so-called bridges Microsoft has created to help developers port their apps to Windows 10. On Tuesday, Kiril Seksenov, a engineer with the company’s Edge Web Apps team, took to the Windows blog to detail how Westminister works.
According to Seksenov, each bridge contains three components: a set of developer tools, a process for submitting and uploading apps to the Windows Store and the Universal Windows Platform runtime. Together, these three components work together to make the process of converting existing app into universal Windows apps relatively painless.
In the case of Westminster, it’s designed to handle that process as it relates to web apps. The other bridges, Project Astoria, Project Islandwood and Project Centennial, do the same for Android apps, iOS apps and older Win32 apps, respectively.
The main advantage of each of these frameworks is that developers can use their existing tools and workflows to create apps for the Windows 10 ecosystem. It’s a good play, because if the past eight years has taught the tech world anything, it’s that operating systems live and die by the depth and breadth of their app ecosystems. That is, it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to make the process of porting existing apps as painless as possible. With the company giving away Windows 10 (mostly) for free, and with the user base of it expected to grow to one billion as a result, developers should have all the incentive they need to develop apps for the operating system.
If these type of in-depth technical posts interest you, make to sure to check out Seksenov’s post here.
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