How to start writing UWP apps with React Native?

Question

So there was this big announcement that you can now write Windows apps using React Native.

The announcement links to a Github page which in turn leads to some description on how to install React Windows

After spending a few hours installing Visual Studio and dependencies, SDKs and whatnot, I've got this "ReactNative" solution built in Visual Studio but I still can't figure out how to even start writing a simple Hello World program.

All the documentation points to how to write Android or iOS programs in Visual Studio Code, but there's no indication on how to write a UWP program.

Does anyone know where to start? What is the Visual Studio equivalent of "react-native init"?

Answer 1

After you've run react-native init AwesomeProject…

cd AwesomeProject
npm i --save-dev rnpm-plugin-windows
react-native windows

This will generate the Visual Studio solution for your project and the index.windows.js entry point. Visual Studio Code is a great tool for editing React Native JavaScript.

To run your app just run react-native run-windows.