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Windows Community Toolkit 4.0 Update Ships

Microsoft has shipped Windows Community Toolkit 4.0, after earlier this year renaming the collection of development tools to reflect its broader reach beyond Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps.

Formerly called the UWP Community Toolkit, the open source project under the direction of the .NET Foundation provides helper functions, custom controls and app services for .NET developers across a range of Windows 10 frameworks.

Since being renamed in May, those frameworks include WPF, WinForms, Xamarin, .NET Core and others. That was made possible by providing toolkit components to Microsoft's new .NET Standard libraries and packages. Now developers targeting those other frameworks can leverage the kit's ability to simplify and demonstrate common developer patterns when creating Windows 10 experiences.

The toolkit, provided via a Visual Studio NuGet package for C# and VB.NET projects, recently surpassed 1 million downloads, and in the v4.0 update announced yesterday (Aug. 8), it receives new functionality.

As detailed in a blog post, the toolkit's new features include:

  • New DataGrid with fluent design for all UWP developers, providing a flexible way to display a collection of data in rows and columns with the Silverlight/WPF programming, model, which should make it familiar to users of those older XAML technologies.
  • Two new Microsoft Graph controls, for the company's developer platform that connects multiple services and devices so coders can leverage data from products like Office 365, Azure Active Directory and so on. The new PowerBIEmbedded control enables embedding PowerBI dashboards in UWP apps, while the new PlannerTasksList control allows users to work with Microsoft Planner tasks.
  • The Twitter, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Translator services have moved to the .NET Standard services package to make them available to even more developers, including those creating desktop and Xamarin applications.
  • Strong-named packages for those developers that require strong-named assemblies.
  • Dark theme support for the sample app and theme chooser for each sample.

Full details are provided in the release notes, and interested developers can also check out the documentation, sample app, getting started tutorial and source code on GitHub.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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