layout: post author:
name: Jan Piotrowski
url: https://twitter.com/Sujan
title: "Cordova Windows 6.0.0 Released!" categories: announcements
We are happy to announce the release of cordova-windows 6.0.0
.
This is a major release that changes functionality you might rely on, so please make sure to read the following list of changes:
cordova build windows
will now build a Windows 10 UWP app by default.cordova build windows -- --appx=8.1-win
, cordova build windows -- --appx=8.1-phone
or an equivalent configuration option.15.5.x
at the time of writing) without any additional configuration or hacks (like the environment variable VSINSTALLDIR
that was required for 5.0.0). (Note: Visual Studio 2017 doesn't support Windows 8.1 apps anymore, so you can only build these apps with Visual Studio 2015 installed.)MSBUILDDIR
allows to directly configure the MSBuild Tools to be used to build the app. While VSINSTALLDIR
always has been a hack that accidentally also worked to switch between different MSBuildTools versions, we now make this functionality explicit: Just set the ENV var to a your desired MSBuild folder (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin
or C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\
) and it will be used to build your project.
As usual, this new version will be added as the default cordova-windows
version for cordova platform add windows
only with the next release of Cordova CLI. Until then, please use these commands to remove and re-add the windows
platform:
cordova platform rm windows
cordova platform add windows@6.0.0
As it's often the case, the 6.0.0
release of cordova-windows is not perfect and has some known limitations:
If you encounter problems with this new version, you can use the GitHub issues of the cordova-windows
repository to do so now.
cordova-windows
Working on this update reminded us how much code there is to support other platform variants besides Windows 10 Desktop / UWP, specifically Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 but also Windows 10 Mobile.
As Microsoft recently ended mainstream support for all Windows 8.1 variants, total market share recedes below 6% and Visual Studio 2017 doesn't support 8.1 development anymore, we don't expect any future changes that would require updates to cordova-windows
' 8.1 support. Same for Windows 10 Mobile, which is not under active development by Microsoft anymore and will not receive any other updates than security fixes.
Because of that, we decided to deprecate all "mobile" and "phone" build targets of cordova-windows
. In the near future, we will release a 7.0.0
version that will remove support for those platform variants and focus on Windows 10 UWP - which will greatly reduce complexity and simplify future maintenance.
cordova-windows 6.0.0
with support for these platforms, of course, will stay available and receive bugfixes if necessary (Similar to how cordova-windows@4
was the last version to support Windows 8.0).
Please tell us in the comments to this blog post if you have any objections or comments to these plans.
MSBUILDDIR
env variable (#262)MSBuildTools.js
(#259)check_reqs
(#258)MSBuildTools.js
work: Debug output, move misplaced method, comments (#255)prepare
script that can be called in e2e tests (#254)uwp
for --appx
param including tests (#251)config.xml
(#235)cordova-windows
cordova.js
for eslint & removing comments and references to jshintcheck_reqs
check_reqs
to properly find VS 2017bugs
entry in package.json