As Microsoft continues its efforts to improve development experience on the Windows platform, the company has just released an open-source UWP Community Toolkit for the developers. The UWP Community Toolkit is built with new capabilities (helper functions, custom controls and app services) to make development easy.
Microsoft aims at easing the app developers to get started with hardly one line of code. Giorgio Sardo, Principal Group Program Manager, Windows/PAX, mentions at the Windows blog,
“The toolkit makes it easy to share content from your app with social providers like Twitter, taking care of all the OAuth authentication steps for you behind the scenes. Additionally, the toolkit provides extension methods that allow developers to animate UI elements with just one line of code”.
The toolkit (source code, issues and roadmap) will be developed as an open-source project and Microsoft is seeking contributions from the .NET developer community for improvements. The company says that the feedback from the community will be reflected in future versions of the Windows SDK for Windows 10.
UWP Community Toolkit
The UWP Community Toolkit 1.0 can be used to build UWP apps for Windows 10 devices like PCs, Smartphones, XBOX, IoT or HoloLens. Developers can employ toolkit with their existing desktop apps converted to UWP using the Desktop Bridge. The toolkit can be used by any new or existing UWP application written in C# or VB.NET.
“Our goal is to support the latest and previous stable release of the SDK and at this time, the toolkit is compatible with apps developed with Windows 10 SDK Build 10586 or above, says Giorgio”.
The first release of UWP Community Toolkit 1.0 comes with new features as listed below,
- Toast
- Blur Animation
- Fade Animation
- Adaptice grid view
- Twitter service
- Facebook service
- Storage file helper
- Helpers, controls, animations and services
For those interested to test the tool before install, Microsoft has released a “UWP Community Toolkit Sample App” in the Windows Store. Using this app you can preview the toolkit capabilities even before installing the tools or downloading the SDK. The app also allows you to easily copy and paste the code you will need to get started using the toolkit in your project.
For the future, Microsoft plans to release stable updates through the Visual Studio NuGet package at frequent time intervals.
Click here to know how you can start using UWP Community Toolkit.
