React Native Windows: react-native-windows_v0.71.0 Release

We're excited to release React Native Windows 0.71.0 targeting React Native 0.71.0. There have been many changes to both react-native-windows and react-native itself, and we would love your feedback on anything that doesn't work as expected.

How to upgrade

You can view the changes made to the default new React Native Windows applications for C++ and C# using React Native Upgrade Helper. See this document for more details.

What's new from React Native

Debuggability

• Improves messaging within the React Native Windows development dependencies script. Now verbose output is supported, .NET check now looks for the SDK (not the runtime). VS check checks for workloads, and the Choco, Chrome, and MSBuild64LongPath check have been removed. ### Reliability
• Modifies CLI scripts to search for a version range of Visual Studio to ensure compatibility between the RNW version and Visual Studio version used in CLI commands.
• Fixes crash when using WinUI3 with keyboard input.
• Ensures a Flyout is only shown if the XamlRoot attached to the Flyout is valid and is the active XamlRoot set in XamlUIService.
• .blur() method for TextInput now works in XamlIslands scenarios.
• Horizontal scrolling with zoom in a ScrollView is now working.
• Resolves bug with C# modules using multi-parameter callbacks.
• Fixes crash creating InstanceSettings on Windows 8.1.
• Enables app paths to contains spaces.
• Increased core component props sample coverage from 27.3% to 36.2% in RNW's snapshot testing.
• Increased core component props test coverage from 3.5% to 26.7% in RNW's snapshot testing.
• Increased community module test coverage from 0% to 80% in React Native Gallery's snapshot testing.

Accessibility

• Adds UIA events which trigger when accessibilityValue has changed. Ensures that accessibility clients like Narrator can announce these types of changes to the user.
• Fixes min/max/now values for accessibilityValue. ### Other
• Upgrades @react-native-cummunity/cli packages to ^10.0.0-alpha.0 version.
• Upgrades Metro to ^0.73.0.
• Upgrades Jest to ^29.0.0.
• Modifies the CompositionRootView interface to take a ReactViewHost instead of separate properties for ComponentName and InitialProperties. Updates to these properties can now be made atomically instead of triggering two rootview reloads to update them both.
• Enables users of the codegen project to opt in to generate the C++ JSI specs if desired.
• Add Rendering driver option to NativeAnimated.
• Implements handling of request with enctype multipart/form-data.
• Adds LayoutService interface to allow native layout updates.
• Fast Text optimization is now applied to Text nodes with multiple runs.
• Adds isPressed field which indicates if onKeyDown has been fired. onKeyUp will not first if isPressed is not true.
• Adds GetReactRootView method XamlUIService.
• Adds support for ImageSource.
• Allows customers to specify $(CppWinRTVersion).
• Move @react-native/tester to a devDependency instead of a dependency.
• Adds a QuirkSetting to opt-in to the YGExperimentalFeatureWebFlexBasis option in Yoga for apps where re-use of cached flex basis value creates problems.
• Adds codegen-windows command, allowing apps to more easily use the windows codegen for nativemodules/turbomodules.
• Adds IViewManagerWithOnLayout interface for ABI VMs. ### Breaking Changes
• React Native Windows is now using Visual Studio 2022. Once you install VS 2022 on your computer, make sure to re-run the development dependencies script on our website to make sure you have all the required dependencies for the new version of Visual Studio. Note this includes upgrading to .NET 6.0.
• Removes dependency on ViewPanel wrapper calls to manage children. Also modifies ViewControl to return a XAML Panel type rather than ViewPanel. This will be a breaking change to the ViewControl ABI.
• focusable and accessible props are now synchronized to align with Windows UIA standards. If a control has either focusable or accessible set to false, the control will lose keyboard and accessibility focus. There is an exception in functionality in the case of the View control, where setting either focusable or accessible to true will allow the component to gain keyboard and accessibility focus.