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Rapid UWP Creation with Windows Template Studio 1.1

Windows Template Studio, the wizard-based coding engine for Windows 10 UWP apps, gains momentum with a newer point release this week. Also, in this week's .NET Insight Podcast, we ask: Who are your programming heroes?

• By Michael Domingo
• 06/30/2017

Michael Crump might be familiar to most of you out there, but if not, know that he's a senior program manager within Microsoft's Azure division who is popular on the conference circuit for his talks on software development. You can also often find him blogging on his site at http://michaelcrump.net/. Some recent topics: enabling Azure CLI with Bash; a series on exploring Docker for Windows; XAML and Visual Layer interop; enhancing UX design with iconography. To be sure, his stuff is esoteric, but also accessible and practical.

Crump has also, in the past, written for Visual Studio Magazine, and he's also written for other publications.

As if he's not busy enough he, along with Clint Rutkas (another Microsoft PM), has created a Visual Studio 2017 extension that can be used to build Universal Windows Platform projects using a wizards-based UI and targeting Windows 10 environments, called Windows Template Studio.

"Windows Template Studio addresses a top community ask in our developer survey to make it easier and provide guidance to create new projects that target the Universal Windows Platform," wrote Crump and Rutkas, in a blog announcing version 1.0 back in May. WTS, it seems, has roots in a tool called Windows App Studio, used for wizard-based app creation. He adds: "We are taking our learnings from the code generation engine and the existing wizard to provide a strong foundation for our code generation and developer experience in Windows Template Studio."

WTS is an open source project on GitHub, and it's currently at version 1.1 as of earlier this week. New in that version are some wizard improvements, including the addition of some code analysis, localization, renaming of pages and background tasks, and a handful of template improvements (covered in more detail in this blog post).

And for those who want to stretch out WTS, Crump links to this WTS resource page.

In this episode of the .NET Insight Podcast, we ask: Who are your programming heroes, or who influenced your decision to steer into a career with technology and computers? Also, some comments on my "Viva, Visual Basic!" column.

Links mentioned in this show:

• The .NET Language Strategy
• Digging Deeper into the Visual Basic Language Strategy, Anthony D. Green
• Viva, Visual Basic!
• Why my guitar gently weeps (registration may be required for some)

Here are a handful of other links we've run across that might be useful to you, in no particular order and definitely not conforming to any particular theme:

• Matt's ALM space: Some tips on Search Server for TFS 2017
• MotzCod.es by James Montemagno: Moving Plugins for Xamarin to .NET Standard
• Channel 9: Introducing Azure DB for PostgreSQL
• reddit.com/r/cpp/: The rise of the new language MC++ – CppDepend Blog
• jonathanchannon.com: Debugging .Net Core apps inside Docker container with VSCode
• StrathWeb.: Using MessagePack with ASP.NET Core MVC
• A List Apart: Team Conflict: Four Ways to Deflate the Discord that's Killing Your Team
• Microsoft DevOps Blog: Extension reporting hub for Marketplace publishers

Know of an interesting link, or does your company have a new or updated product or service targeted at Visual Studio developers? Tell me about it at [email protected].