Microsoft has released version 7.0 of its Windows Community Toolkit, a utility that enables developers to collaborate and contribute new capabilities on top of the new Windows 10 SDK.
The latest version contains a whole bunch of new features and enhancements.
This is a project designed to simplify many of the tasks that developers have to perform when building UWP and .NET applications. Announced back in 2016 as UWP Community Toolkit, the software titan rebranded it to Windows Community Toolkit in 2018.
Redmond has been rigorously updating this solution with new features in every release, and this one is no different.
For starters, the company has refactored numerous packages in order to decouple dependencies when only a small number of components are being used in the app. In most scenarios, this results in a decrease of 80-90% in the size footprint of the application.
Most of these changes affect the Animation and Controls packages, and developers are advised to refer to Microsoft’s documentation here in order to identify any breaking changes to their apps.
Windows Community Toolkit 7.0 also comes with a new MVVM library built on the foundation of platform agnosticism, modularity, flexibility, and performance. Since it targets the .NET standard, it can be utilized on any platform that supports it — including UWP, WPF, Xamarin, and more.
You can find out more about the new MVVM library here.
There is an improved notification support for Win32 and .NET 5 apps, an improved ColorPicker, a TabbedCommandBar navigation interface, a new AnimationBuilder class, and SwitchPresenter to better organize your XAML.
The software titan also promises new features that are coming next.
Microsoft has released previews of the Toolkit that work with version 0.5 of Project Reunion Preview. Over the coming weeks, the company will also be releasing an update version of WinUI 3 controls to NuGet for Project Reunion 0.5.
You can find out more about how to get started with Windows Community Toolkit here.
