Microsoft improving Windows on Arm support for Visual Studio with MAUI, LLVM, Node, Unity

Windows on ARM

At its Build 2023 event today, Microsoft has shared some of the developments and headways it has been making in terms of Windows on Arm development. In the list of applications that are getting upgrades are Visual Studio, Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), Node.JS, WiX Installer, Luminar Neo, and Unity Player.

Visual Studio is now shipping with Arm support thanks to .NET Multi-platform App User Interface (MAUI). MAUI is a cross-platform framework that helps to create native desktop and mobile apps with C# and XAML.

Meanwhile, LLVM is getting native compile support for Arm. Speaking of native support, Node.js is also getting native Arm support with latest version 20.0.0 that contains new binaries. Additionally, it has also received Arm64 tier 2 support. Moving on, Windows Installer XML (WiX) version 4.0 has received support for Arm64 in the core toolset, extensions, and Burn.

On the creator side, apps like Luminar Neo: Skylum, which is an AI photo editing software, have also gained native support for Arm. The Unity Player is also getting native Arm support and will be generally available (GA) in June.

The full highlights regarding Windows on Arm progress are given below:

Visual Studio: Visual Studio 17.6 will ship with MAUI support for Arm.

Visual Studio 17.71 Preview 1 now ships with support for Linux development with C++.

LLVM v12.0 and onwards for cross compile and native compile options for Arm

Node 20.0.0 with native Arm support.

WiX installer v4.0 is available to create native installers for Arm.

Luminar Neo: Skylum is releasing its native Arm version of photo editing AI software, Luminar Neo, which can be installed from the Microsoft Store on Windows.

In addition, Unity Player will become generally available in early June for Windows on Arm natively. Developers using the middleware engine can easily target Windows on Arm devices to get native performance on current and future titles.