Meet WinRT, the Windows Runtime API

This was presented by Christof Wollenhaupt at Virtual Fox Fest 2022 (October): https://virtualfoxfest.com

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is confused by the pile of technology that Microsoft is throwing at us in quick succession. Before I get a chance to take a deeper look at some of these offerings, they are already outdated, replaced, or maybe only renamed.

In this session, we take a closer look at the Windows Runtime API. It's best known as the technological foundation of the Universal Windows Platform aka the apps you download from the Microsoft Store. WinRT isn't limited to new apps which are out of reach for Visual FoxPro. With a little effort and some glue code in C#, it's even open to traditional Visual FoxPro applications.

WinRT was meant to be the successor of Win32API. As such, its feature set matches much more modern computing capabilities and requirements. For instance, there's an OCR engine built right into the runtime. Unlike many other offerings these days, all of it runs locally on the device. There's no subscription you need, nor do sensitive files need to be shared with cloud services. We look at how OCR works from VFP and how you can combine this with PDF generation and scanning documents.

There are so many more features in WinRT. We will look at various APIs to access sensors, use machine learning, cryptography, and speech recognition. Some features in the WinRT API require package identity, which provides us with the opportunity to look into the package concept and briefly cover MSIX deployment.

This session is not about creating your own Universal Windows Platform application or the Microsoft app store. We also won't look into any modern UI, because the UI part of WinRT isn't supported in classic desktop applications like Visual FoxPro.