Microsoft has released the latest, and one of the largest, new version of the Windows Community Toolkit to help developers write apps for Windows 10.
Now up to version 7, the newest release of the toolkit includes everything app developers need to build Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and .NET apps for any Windows 10 device including PC, Mobile, Xbox, IoT and HoloLens.
“This is one of the largest releases of the Toolkit ever as we embarked to optimize and streamline the Toolkit for the future,” wrote Microsoft’s Senior Software Engineer, Michael A. Hawker.
Lighter apps
Formerly known as the UWP Community Toolkit, the Windows Community Toolkit is developed under the aegis of the .NET foundation. It’s hosted on GitHub and a majority of the tools in the toolkit are licensed under the open source MIT license.
In his release announcement, Hawker notes that one of the headline features of the release is the inclusion of a completely new .NET Standard Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) library. Other marquee new features include easier to use toast notification helpers for both .NET and UWP, along with a revamped composition Animation system for C# & XAML.
Another major change is the internal package refactoring to help reduce the size of the apps created using the toolkit.
“We have refactored many packages within the Toolkit. This was to help reduce pulling in extra dependencies for the whole package when only a small number of components required them. This has allowed us to reduce the application size footprint impact of the Toolkit in common scenarios by 80-90%,” explains Hawker.
App developers can preview the latest features of the toolkit by installing the Windows Community Toolkit Sample App from the Microsoft Store.
Via: ZDNet