The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Community Toolkit is an open source tool that can be used to simplify the development of apps for Windows 10 based devices or to help you bridge an app over to Windows 10 UWP from the desktop version of the software.
The toolkit even has a UWP Community Toolkit Sample App that can be downloaded from the Windows Store so you can preview the capabilities in the toolkit ahead of installing it and the Windows SDK.
The initial version of the UWP Community Toolkit was released back in August and this latest update adds several new helpers and updates others.
Here is the rundown from Microsoft for version 1.2.
New Helpers
- BackgroundTaskHelper to help you work with background tasks
- HttpHelper to help you deal with HTTP requests in a secure and reliable way
- PrintHelper to help you print XAML controls
- DispacherHelper to help you work with tasks that need to run on UI thread
- DeepLinkHelper to simplify the management of your deep links
- WebViewExtensions to allow you to bind HTML content to your Webview
- SystemInformation to gather all system information into a single and unique class
Along with the addition of a new MasterDetailView control, the following items were updated in this new release:
- ImageCache was improved to provide a more robust cache
- HeaderedTextBlock and PullToRefreshListView now accept ContentTemplate customization
- Facebook service now supports paging when requesting data
- Renamed BladeControl to BladeView. BladeView now also derives from ItemsControl. This will allow for more common convention like data binding and will make the control aligned with SDK naming. To guarantee backward compatibility, we kept the previous control and flagged it as obsolete. This way, developers can still reference the new version and everything will work just fine. A compiler warning will just encourage you to use the new version. The current plan is to keep obsolete classes until next major version and then remove them.
If you want to see what is in the works for the next update to the UWP Community Toolkit you can check out this GitHub milestone tracker.
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
