Windows 10 SDK

Ecmangen.exe will no longer ship with the Windows SDK. Developers who rely on ecmangen for event manifest creation are advised to install the Windows Creators Edition of the SDK to obtain the file. Developers may also use notepad or other XML editor of choice for manifest creation. A schema file is available provided, see:

\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.16299.0\um\eventman.xsd

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Header generation for WinRT types generation is moving from the MIDL tool to the MIDLRT tool. This change will enable significant performance enhancements and will also enable a number of new features.

The most common issue developers are likely to encounter is the addition of deprecation support to the generated WinRT headers. With this change, if you consume a deprecated API, the C++ compiler will now generate a warning indicating that your code is accessing a deprecated type.

Consider the following when evaluating how your code will be impacted:

1. The WinMDIDL tool used to emit cpp_quote directives to work around a MIDL header generation limitation. Those cpp_quote directives are incompatible with the new header generation logic and need to be removed (or the IDL file needs to be regenerated).
2. WinRT types that are marked as [deprecated] are now also marked as [[deprecated]] in the generated C++ headers. This means that you may encounter C4996 warnings indicating that you are accessing a deprecated type. To resolve this issue, you can define DISABLE_WINRT_DEPRECATION in the preprocessor definitions for your project to ignore the deprecations.

To further align Visual C++ with the ISO standard for C++, enumerations for Windows Runtime types are now standards-compliant. If you develop software with the Windows 10 SDK, this change might affect you.

Specifically, variables in operations with enumerations that are marked as flags must be cast as unsigned integers. An operation that uses a signed integer with an enumeration constant will result in a compiler error, because enumeration constants are now unsigned integers. The affected enumerations are flags enumerations supplied by the SDK and enumerations that you cast with the [flags] attribute.

For example, the following code casts bit as an integer:

GamePadReading->get_Buttons(&NewButtonMask); for(int index=0;index<32;index++) { int bit = 1 << index; if( ((NewButtonMask & bit) == bit) && ((CurrentButtonMask & bit) != bit)) { JustPressedButtonMask |= (GamepadButtons)bit;

However, because this code relies on GamepadButtons, which has the attribute System.FlagsAttribute, bit must instead be cast as unsigned:

unsigned int bit = 1 << index;