Microsoft is making progress toward its goal of closing the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Win32 divide. Next week, timed with Microsoft's Ignite conference, the company is planning to release an alpha version of Win UI 3.0, its next-generation user interface platform for Windows. As I noted a few months back at Build, Microsoft's days of trying to push Windows developers to build or repackage their apps to be UWP/Store apps seemingly are over. Microsoft is changing the definitions and goalposts so it ultimately will just designate everything as "Windows apps." The WinUI 3.0 alpha will be for testing and feedback and fairly rough. After the alpha is out, Microsoft is planning to get the full Win UI 3 Xaml platform migrated over to GitHub in open source form. A more complete preview of WinUI 3.0 is coming in the first half of 2020, according to the team's roadmap, and the final release of WinUI 3.0 will happen sometime next year, as well. The WinUI 3.0 alpha will start with UWP.