Microsoft Open Sources Windows Calculator – Features, Build Instructions, and Community Feedback

Microsoft announced that the Windows 10 Calculator application is now open‑sourced under the MIT license, with the source code hosted on GitHub and quickly gaining over 7,000 stars.

The calculator is a modern Windows app written in C++, offering standard, scientific, and programmer modes, unit and currency conversion, and history features.

Features include:

Standard calculator operations with immediate evaluation.

Scientific calculator with extended operations and proper order of evaluation.

Programmer calculator providing common mathematical functions.

Calculation history and memory capabilities.

Unit conversion between different measurement systems.

Currency conversion using data retrieved from Bing.

Project prerequisites:

Windows 10 version 1803 or later.

Latest Visual Studio (Community edition is sufficient) with the "Universal Windows Platform Development" workload.

Optional components: "C++ Universal Windows Platform tools" and the latest Windows 10 SDK.

Additional recommended tools include the Visual Studio extension XAML Styler.

To build the project, clone the repository, open src\Calculator.sln in Visual Studio, and run the app.

For a detailed architecture overview, see ApplicationArchitecture.md in the repository.

The open‑source release has sparked community interest, quickly climbing GitHub Trending and accumulating over 100 issues, including humorous bugs such as division‑by‑zero handling and UI pixel misalignments.

Microsoft frames the release as part of its broader commitment to open source, encouraging developers to explore UWP, XAML, and Azure Pipelines, and to reuse the code for their own projects.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator