Microsoft offers downloadable virtual machines designed to create UWP applications for Windows. The virtual machines come with Windows 11 2022 Update (version 22H2), Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition, and other development tools
When you download the development environment, you can choose a virtual machine for VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, or Parallels. The size of each image is 18 to 20 gigabytes.
These virtual machines with Windows 11 Enterprise expire on May 23, 2023.
You get all the application development tools you need for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP):
- Windows 11 (version 22H2) Enterprise, introductory version
- Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition with UWP workloads, classic .NET applications, Azure, and the Windows application SDK for C# included
- Windows Subsystem for Linux with Ubuntu installed
- Developer mode enabled
- Windows Terminal
The Windows 11 development environment download site also contains plenty of code examples, tutorials, and documentation for app developers.
How to change the language in Windows: turn on the Russian interfaceSuppose you do not have a license for VMware or Parallels and you do not use Windows 11. In that case, we recommend trying VirtualBox and the corresponding virtual machine image for using this development environment. VirtualBox is distributed free of charge and supports snapshots, which allow you to save a specific state of a virtual machine for later restoration.
When installing through VirtualBox, you will need to import a virtual machine, and when prompted for an OVA file, you will need to specify the file that was downloaded and extracted. Use the default settings (see in the screenshot above), with extra RAM allocated. Then click the “Import” button. After the import, you can start the guest system and explore the application development environment for the universal Windows platform.