Targetting Windows 8.1 with Windows 10 SDK in C++

Question

we currently build our C++ Code with Visual Studio 2017 and we were required to have our binaries run on Windows 7 as well until only recently.

Hence our settings in C++ projects for the Windows SDK version to be used is "8.1" and by defining _WIN32_WINNT=0x601 as a preprocessor macro, we target Windows 7 as a platform, as recommended at various places by Microsoft.

Now we want to add ARM64 as a new platform, but this requires the Windows SDK version to be set to 10.0.10240.0 and since the Windows SDK Version to be used is a project global setting, this would affect the existing other platforms we build for (Win32 and x64) as well.

Now if we set the Windows SDK version from 8.1 to 10.0.10240.0 (or later versions), would we lose the ability to run our code on Windows 8.1, as long as we use _WIN32_WINNT=0x602 (for targetting Windows 8.1)?

Answer 1

The comment from Minxin Yu is the answer to this question. This discussion points to the Windows SDK page that clearly states that the current Win10 SDK allows for targetting Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1.