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The Windows SDK (10.0.22000) for Windows 11 provides the latest headers, libraries, metadata, and tools for building Windows applications. Use this SDK to build Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Win32 applications for Windows 11 and previous Windows releases.
Note
Windows 10, version 21H2 is a scoped set of features for select performance improvements and quality enhancements. Developers should be aware of this release, but no action is necessary at this time. A new Windows SDK will not be issued to accompany this version of Windows because this release doesn’t introduce new APIs. That means there’s no need to modify your project files or target a new version of Windows, and you should continue to use Windows SDK (10.0.22000) for Windows 11.
Tip
Windows App SDK
The Windows App SDK provides a unified set of APIs and tools that are decoupled from the OS and released to developers via NuGet packages. These APIs and tools can be used in a consistent way by any desktop app on Windows 11 and downlevel to Windows 10, version 1809.
You can get the Windows SDK in two ways: install it from this page by selecting the download link or by selecting “Windows 11 SDK (10.0.22000)” in the optional components of the Visual Studio 2019 Installer. Before you install this SDK:
Last updated: October 4, 2021
The Windows SDK has the following minimum system requirements:
(Not all tools are supported on earlier operating systems)
Installation on Windows 8.1 and earlier operating systems requires an Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows. To install through Windows Update, make sure you install the latest recommended updates and patches from Microsoft Update before you install the Windows SDK.
The Windows SDK for Windows 11 lets you update your apps for the latest version of the Windows OS. Learn more about the new features in Windows 11.
To see the new APIs introduced with Windows 11, see New APIs in Windows 11 build 22000.
Rebuilt the binaries of the Windows 11 on ARM operating system itself with ARM64EC so that any system code loaded by x64 apps runs with native speed. Take advantage of ARM64EC to incrementally transition your app to running with native speed on ARM, even if you have dependencies or plugins that don’t support ARM yet. Read announcement.
Windows app samples are now available through GitHub. You can browse the code on GitHub, clone a personal copy of the repository from Git, or download a zipped archive of all the samples. We welcome feedback, so feel free to open an issue within the repository if you have a problem or question. These samples are designed to run on desktop, mobile, and future devices that support the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).
Previously released SDKs and emulators, including update details, can be found on the archive page.
When you use new APIs, consider writing your app to be adaptive so that it runs correctly on the widest array of Windows devices. An adaptive app "lights up" with new features wherever the devices and Windows version supports them, but otherwise offers only the functionality available on the detected platform version. For implementation details, see the Version adaptive code article.
Removed api-ms-win-net-isolation-l1-1-0.lib. Apps that were linking against api-ms-win-net-isolation-l1-1-0.lib can switch t OneCoreUAP.lib as a replacement.
Removed irprops.lib. Apps that were linking against irprops.lib can switch to bthprops.lib as a drop-in replacement.
Moved ENUM tagServerSelection from wuapicommon.h to wupai.h and removed the header. If you would like to use the ENUM tagServerSelection, you will need to include wuapi.h or wuapi.idl.
The Windows 10 WinRT API Pack lets you add the latest Windows Runtime APIs support to your .NET Framework 4.5+ and .NET Core 3.0+ libraries and apps. To access the Windows 10 WinRT API Pack, see the Microsoft.Windows.SDK.Contracts nuget package.
The printf family of functions now conforms with the IEEE 754 rounding rules when printing exactly representable floating-point numbers and will honor the rounding mode requested via calls to fesetround. Legacy behavior is available when linking with legacy_stdio_float_rounding.obj.
Windows App Certification Kit. Several new APIs were added to the Supported APIs list in the App Certification Kit and Windows Store. If there are APIs in the supported list that appear greyed out or disabled in Visual Studio, you can make a small change to your source file, to access them. For more details, see this known issue. Find more updates to tests.
Message Compiler (mc.exe) updates:
Windows Trace Preprocessor (tracewpp.exe) updates:
TraceLoggingProvider.h updates:
Signing your apps. Device Guard signing is a Device Guard feature that is available in Microsoft Store for Business and Education, which allows enterprises to guarantee every app comes from a trusted source. See the documentation about Device Guard Signing.
SDK headers have been updated to address errors when compiling using the standard-conformant C preprocessor in the MSVC compiler cl.exe (/Zc:preprocessor, introduced in VS 2019 v16.6).
Fixed: “GdiplusTypes.h does not compile with NOMINMAX”. See Visual Studio Feedback.
When building with /std:c11 or /std:c17, you now get:
Clang/LLVM for Windows v11 targeting ARM64 is not compatible with the latest winnt.h
DirectXMath (including version 3.16 in this release) is not compatible with Clang/LLVM for Windows on ARM64.
The case of some header files were changed, to normalize them for case-sensitive file systems:
-Wno-nonportable-system-include-path
to the CLI, or the following #pragma in source:#ifdef __clang__
#pragma clang diagnostic ignored "-Wnonportable-system-include-path"
#endif
This release contains the following files. If you encounter these issues, we recommend that you update your version of the SDK as soon as possible to avoid them:
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