There have been a handful of new announcements and features from the Windows and Edge development teams this past week.
Among some of these items you have the planned end of Adobe Flash by 2020 and the changes in Edge for that, new options for developers listing their apps in the Windows Store to attack users, restarting your app/game programmatically when necessary, and configuring an app to start up when a user logs in to their system.
The End of an Era – Next Steps for Adobe Flash
Last week Adobe made it official and confirmed they will deprecate Flash and end support in 2020. That is welcome news to many across the web because the platform, which once provided us richer experiences on the web, has more recently became an attack vector for malicious software appearing like a Flash update.
The Microsoft Edge team has been working to change the behavior of Flash in Edge over the last two years since the release of Windows 10. Most recently in the Creators Update users must Click to Run Flash in the Edge browser.
Now that the end date for Flash is known the Edge team is laying out the roadmap for ending Flash support in Edge over the next three years.
Windows Store: video trailers, improved Store listings, advanced sales, and other new capabilities
Developers looking to make their apps stand out just a little bit more in the Windows Store can now use the above mentioned enhancements in their Store listings.
This post provides all the details devs need to get started on updating their Store listings adn the new features are already available.
If you have ever browsed the Store on an Xbox One console, many of the Store listings there are already using some of these features.
How to Restart your App Programmatically
There are times that devs might need to restart their app in order to apply an update, recognize and install DLC, or maybe just to remedy an error.
That process can be accomplished in UWP apps through a new API from Microsoft that will terminate the app and then restart it.
This article uses a test app, and provides all the code, to show you how to implement this option in your own apps.
Configure your app to start at log-in
Remember the Start Folder in older versions of Windows? Ever notice that Windows 10 does not have one?
That folder was very handy to stick a program shortcut in to start that software up when the system started up or rebooted.now app developers can do that same style of thing by
The ability to start up Win32 apps and Desktop bridge Apps programmatically has existed for a while however, now regular UWP apps can now include an option to do the same thing.
This is available in current Fast Ring builds of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update as they are being tested and will be finalized when that update is released in the September time frame.
This article has all the code samples you need to get started using this feature in your apps.
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