The Redmond giant is confident that it will be able to achieve very significant performance improvements in Windows 11, and the key behind this is in applications based on the Windows App SDK, a set of tools that serves as a bridge between Win32 and UWP (Universal Windows Platform) applications.

I’m sure many of our readers remember that at the time, UWP was considered by Microsoft to be the future of Windows, the best for apps, but eventually the Redmond giant realized that could not fight Win32and he had no choice but to to acknowledge “his defeat”.

With the Windows App SDK, Microsoft tried to unite both worlds and give developers the opportunity to use their favorite framework without having to give up using modern APIs. According to Microsoft, applications were developed using this kit They can charge up to 50% faster.

The secret to making all apps developed using the Windows App SDK load much faster is in the native support for AOT, an abbreviation in English for “Ahead of Time” (AoT), which indicates “ahead” compilation. Developers can implement it in their applications to achieve this performance improvement.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the optimizations offered by this new development kit make it possible to reduce the size of application installation packages. up to 8 times, and can also help reduce memory consumption.

Apps developed with Windows App SDK 1.6 and higher with AoT natively implemented see a significant performance jump in Windows 11, namely It will also improve the user experience of said operating system, which is known to have very slow boot times for basic applications. For example, the “Photos” app can take several seconds to launch, even on a high-end computer.

To solve this problem with the “Photos” application, Microsoft concluded that it was a good idea leave it open in the background. Yes, it should work, but as you might have imagined, it consumes a small amount of RAM to keep it running in the background. The review and optimization process through the Windows App SDK 1.6 would be a much better solution, although it would require more effort.

Application launch times are basic part user experience of any operating system, so it makes sense that Microsoft wants to improve this aspect in Windows 11. It looks good on paper, but we’ll see how it turns out in practice.

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