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. However, it is now in maitenance mode, and will probably be abandoned in the short to medium term.

Building

You need Visual Studio 2026 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, but it is possible to consume C++/WinRT by stuffing it into and re-exporting it from a module. 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