Windows Template Studio 2.0 Ships with Improved Visual Studio UI -- Visual Studio Magazine

Windows Template Studio 2.0 Ships with Improved Visual Studio UI

By David Ramel
04/19/2018

Windows Template Studio, a Visual Studio extension that provides a low-code approach to creating Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, yesterday launched in version 2.0.

Available in the Visual Studio Marketplace, Windows Template Studio uses a wizard-based approach to creating UWP apps, leveraging a variety of ready-to-go project templates. Developers can use the tool with C# or VB.NET programming languages.

Microsoft says resulting UWP projects contain well-formed, readable code using the latest Windows 10 features while implementing proven patterns and best practices. "Sprinkled throughout the generated code we have links Docs, Stack Overflow and blogs to provide useful insights," Microsoft says.

Under the hood, Microsoft said, v2.0 has received a boost resulting from its developers working with the Visual Studio team.

"We've done a lot of work improving the user interface and being sure we're fully accessible for all developers," Microsoft's Clint Rutkas said in a post yesterday. "By partnering with the Visual Studio team, we feel the new interface is faster and more approachable. We've improved our template updating experience, our actual templates and much more. Our wizard also now detects dark, light and high contrast modes of Visual Studio."

Visual Studio developers who have already installed the extension should see it updated automatically. New users can download the VSIX installer.

Rutkas said the tool's navigation control will be switched out with the next update of Windows 10. That will be a new native control replacing the UWP Community Toolkit's Hamburger menu control.

Other improvements have focused on improving documentation, which company-wide is switching to the docs.microsoft.com platform.

"The docs that will stay on WTS's GitHub will be docs on modifying the engine or creating a template for the wizard to consume," Rutkas said.

The Windows Template Studio extension has been installed more than 401,000 times, earning an average 3.5 rating (scale to 5) from 42 reviewers.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.