How do you start a Game Bar Widget project in Visual Studio Community 2026?

[ReticentRobot]

I'm trying to start experimenting with Game Bar Widget development, but from what I can tell, Microsoft has started deprecating UWP in favor of WinUI 3 and packaged Win32 apps - and Visual Studio 2025+ removed UWP support from Community Edition? You can now only create a UWP workload in the paid versions of Visual Studio?

I saw the UWP Tools download under the WinUI workload, but when I try to find out if that would work I'm getting this, is this true?:

WinUI ≠ UWP

WinUI 3 apps are Win32 desktop apps packaged with MSIX, not UWP apps.

Game Bar widgets require:

• A UWP app package
• A UWP manifest
• UWP activation types
• The Game Bar AppExtension registration
• The Microsoft.Gaming.XboxGameBar UWP NuGet package

WinUI apps cannot satisfy any of these requirements.

Can I not use the UWP Blank App project template in the WinUI application development workload in VS 2026 Community to create a Game Bar Widget?