Gone are the days of choosing a location on the hard drive and saving/loading. UWP adopts a more phone or tablet-like approach where the user must give permissions before an app can conduct specific kinds of actions – including looking at specific folders, even in a desktop application.
With UWP, you now have StorageFolders. There is a decent amount of documentation directly from Microsoft on the subject:
- Create, write, and read a file
- Open files and folders with a picker
- File access permissions
- Files and folders in Music, Pictures, and Video libraries
In short, a developer can only touch files that:
- AppData location.
- Are given capabilities in the manifest file – for example, music, videos, etc.
- Are declared as allowed extensions in the manifest file.
- Have been previously selected by a user from a FileOpenPicker or FolderOpenPicker
Of particular interest, the ability to write to the “My Documents” folder is completely gone – and it looks like it was a somewhat recent change.