The requirements for building the samples says that you need "Windows SDK version 2004 (build 19041) or later. ". Which isn't really true; certain samples require specific Windows SDKs. For example, samples\AppLifecycle\Activation\cpp\cpp-win32-unpackaged\CppWinMainActivation\CppWinMainActivation.vcxproj requires 10.0.22000.0 (which is actually out of support), and there's a good number that fail to build if 10.0.19041 isn't installed.
Given that customers should be using a recent Windows SDK, could the samples all snap forward to, say, 10.0.26100.0?