Is it OK for me to develop against UWP with JavaScript on Visual Studio 2017?

Question

My company is using RPG Maker MV (based on JavaScript) and looking to port over to Xbox UWP. It's no longer supported in the latest version of Visual Studio.

Is there a workaround or should I abandon this and convert over to C#?

Answer 1

UPDATE November 8, 2023:

This answer has been deprecated. WebView2 is the preferred way to utilize HTML5 game engines such as RPG Maker MV/MZ and has now entered general availability on the Xbox platform. For more information, see this blog post from Microsoft. This answer will be updated with further information on the revised procedures once I have had an opportunity to create a test implementation that accounts for these changes.

Original answer:

Sadly this has indeed been deprecated, but as a workaround you can use a WebView to host the game which is what I do with mine. You'll still have to deal with a few extra things if you want to use the Xbox storage functions (see here for my commentary on this) and you still need to implement sign-in (which I'm still working on) but once you add the WebView to your MainPage.xaml name it something like ContentViewport and (immediately following your login and file processing logic) add the following line of code:

ContentViewport.Source = new Uri("ms-appx-web:///index.html");

Or wherever your index.html is, so if you prefer assets over package root with the www folder copied in as a base, you can use the following:

ContentViewport.Source = new Uri("ms-appx-web:///assets/www/index.html");