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Getting Started With UWP Community Toolkit 1.1

UWP Community Toolkit

UWP Community Toolkit is a collection of new capabilities such as app services, custom controls, and helper functions, that includes a wide range of possibilities (tools). From the developers' point of view, it includes common app templates, innovative and imperative Windows apps, Windows Runtime APIs, and emulators, by which developers can interact to the new capabilities that UWP Toolkit has.

UWP Community Toolkit is designed for the developer community and can be used for simplification of the code according to their needs, by which developers can perform common developer tasks easily. The ultimate goal of UWP Community Toolkit is to get started with  a single line of code having a wide range of possibilities. This Toolkit is totally open source and you can share your content directly from your app to the social sites, such as Twitter.


Image Source - http://www.uwpcommunitytoolkit.com

This toolkit can be used to build interactive UWP apps for any Windows 10 device, including PC, HoloLens, Mobile, XBOX, and IoT. The UWP Community Toolkit is available in NuGet Package for new C# and VB.NET or existing projects/applications.

The "UWP Community Toolkit Sample App" improves the visibility of the code while writing your own Windows apps. A developer can find a lot of solutions in this toolkit. To know more about the capabilities of it, you can install "UWP Toolkit Sample App" from this link.

 
Image Source: https://www.microsoft.com

You can add this Toolkit with any of the existing or new projects, by using Visual Studio. For this Toolkit, you have to download Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 with Windows developer tools and Windows 10 SDK.
 
As you can see in the below figure, I’m using Visual Studio 2015 with Update 3 and the Windows 10 SDK already. I’m trying to install Universal Windows App Development Tools directly from my Universal project.
 
For this, simply click on to “Install Universal Windows Tools”.



Now, select the "Universal Windows App Development Tools" and click on the Next button.
 


Here, you can see that the development tools are installing with Windows 10 SDK.
 


After completing the installation part, open Visual Studio or Restart your system.
 
Now, let's install UWP Community Toolkit UI Control in our system.
  
Create a new UWP project using "Blank App (Universal Windows)" template under Installed >> Templates >> Visual C# >> Windows >> Universal.
 
Give a meaningful name to your project and hit OK button to create it.
 
 

Specify the Target and Minimum versions that your app will support.
 


A Universal project has been created. Add the UWP Community Toolkit to your project with the help of "Manage NuGet Packages", as shown below.
 


Search for “Microsoft.Toolkit.UWP” in the search box, and select desired package.
 


Click on the "Install" button.
 


Now, add one more desired package “Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI.Controls” and install it.
 


We can see that both the packages have been installed in the project.
 


How to add the UWP Community Toolkit to your Visual Studio Toolbox –

For UWP toolbox, we need to add a reference of tools from NuGet Package, i.e., “Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI.Controls” we just discussed.

Open any XAML page from your project and select the Toolbox on the left side of Visual Studio. Right click on a tab and select Add Tab.
 


Give a name to it, such as UWP Toolkit. Right click on to the tab you just created and select "Choose Items...".
 


Then, select "Browse" from the "Choose Toolbox Items" dialog.
 


Navigate to the folder on your machine, as in the following screenshot. This is the navigate path to the controls.

c:\Users\%USERNAME%\.nuget\packages\Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI.Controls\
 


Here is a list of all UI Controls from the Toolbox Items. Click on OK button to add these controls.
 


Your toolbox should now have a list of UI Controls from the toolkit, which you can drag and drop onto your selected XAML surfaces.
 


What’s New in UWP Community Toolkit 1.1

This release comes with new possibilities and some new cool Controls including GridSplitter, FadeHeader, BladeControl, and ImageEx etc. There are some new services, such as - Linkedin Service, MicrosoftGraph Service, Twitter Service, Facebook Service, and Bing Service.
  • Improved quality of the Toolkit.

  • Updates and new features, such as Services, Controls, and Animations.

  • Sample app

    The UWP Community Toolkit Sample App has been updated. You can know more about the features, such as Controls, Notifications, Animations, Services, and Helpers of the toolkit, by using this "Sample App".

  • Documentation

    Documentation has been moved to a new location, directly connected to GitHub.

  • Controls

    • New Blade Control 
    • New GridSplitter Control 
    • RotatorTile improvements
    • New DropShadowPanel 
    • HeaderTextBlock
    • Added StepSize and IsInteractive to RadialGauge 
    • HamburgerMenu updates 
    • SlidableListItem
    • SlidableListItem improvements

  • UI
    • Improved converters and introduction of generic converters
    • In-memory layer of caching in ImageCache Generic CacheBase class

  •  Animations

    • New animation support: FadeHeaderBehavior 

  • Helpers

    • Added HyperlinkExtensions class
    • New Incremental Loading Collection 
    • Local and Roaming Object Storage helper 

  • Services

    • Service Provider for Microsoft Graph 
    • Service Provider for LinkedIn 
    • Parameter in BingSearchConfig to get results from BingNews. Also added support for languages 
    • Facebook service can now retrieve albums and photos 
Well, this concludes that UWP Community Toolkit 1.1 has more quality features than our expectation.


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