Read original post by Peter Kuhn at Mister Goodcat
It's not a secret that desktop applications are able to use certain WinRT APIs too. In some of the documentation, for example that of the Accelerometer class, you can read:
Applies to: Windows Store apps | desktop apps
There's even an overview list of all the WinRT classes that can be used from the desktop, conveniently compiled and linked to on a single page. So clearly there must be a way to include them in your normal, non-Windows Store applications. But when I tried to actually do that, I found little to no documentation on it and was struggling to set up everything.