Microsoft has launched its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Community Toolkit, aimed at simplifying common developer tasks to make it easier to create apps for Windows 10 devices. The toolkit is being developed as an open source project. Here’s what you need to know.
The toolkit can be used by any new or existing UWP app written in C# or Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET). There are a number of feature that are designed to simplify certain tasks for Windows 10 app developers, including a feature that makes it easy to share content from an app with social media providers such as Facebook and Twitter and takes care of all the OAuth authentication process behind the scenes.
Various features ranging from in-app controls to animations are available through the toolkit and you can see a full list of them over at the UWP Community Toolkit GitHub page. Community feedback about the available toolkit features will play a part in helping Microsoft decide which ones to officially move to the Windows 10 SDK.
According to Microsoft senior director for Windows: “In the future, we plan to release stable updates through the Visual Studio NuGet package at a regular cadence… We are looking forward to continuing to grow the toolkit with even more community contributions.”
If you’re keen to preview the features in the toolkit, Microsoft has also released an app on the Windows Store that lets you do this.
To get started with the UWP Community Toolkit, you’ll need to download Visual Studio 2015 with Update 3 and the Windows 10 SDK. Head over to the Windows Blog for the full instructions.
[Via Windows Blog]
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