Windows 10: Announcing Windows Community Toolkit v5.1

Brink · Feb 13, 2019

It’s with great pleasure today that we announce the next update to the Windows Community Toolkit, version 5.1, made possible with help and contributions from our developer community. This update brings high-quality animation support with the inclusion of Lottie-Windows in the toolkit. In addition, it provides a control for choosing Remote Devices, a new Image Cropping control, and many control accessibility fixes.

See more details on these features below.

Animations with Lottie-Windows

This new library provides high quality animation support on Windows 10 (1809) by utilizing the Windows.UI.Composition APIs and allows for the consumption of Bodymovin JSON files or optimized code-generated classes for playback in your Windows apps. It is the successor to the LottieUWP community project.

Try installing the new Lottie Viewer app from the Microsoft Store to test out animations and generate optimized code for your Windows apps.

Documentation for Lottie-Windows.

Remote Device Picker

The Remote Device Picker allows a user to select a device, proximally or cloud accessible, from a dialog. The app can then use this information to perform various scenarios like opening and communicating with an app on the chosen device. Read more about what’s possible after selecting a device like opening an app or creating an app service.

This is possible with Project Rome which allows building people-centric experiences across devices and platforms (Android, Windows, iOS). For example having your app or website (using MS Graph APIs) continue a task to another device or create companion experiences that can communicate with each other across devices, like a remote control.

Documentation for RemoteDevicePicker. Read more about Project Rome capabilities here.

Image Cropper

The new Image Cropper control allows you to provide effortless image cropping functionality to your app. Perfect for user selected profile pictures and photo editing tools.
Documentation for ImageCropper.

Accessibility Improvements

We’ve been striving to increase the accessibility of our controls in the last release and this one. This update provides more fixes to keyboard navigation, high contrast, and narrator readability to the toolkit controls.

.NET Core 3.0 Preview for WPF and WinForms Packages

With the recent release of .NET Core 3.0 preview 2, we’ve shipped a toolkit 6.0 preview package for our WPF/WinForms library Microsoft.Toolkit.Win32 to support it. Please download it here for WPF or WinForms to give it a try in your .NET Core applications. Report any issues here.

Get started today

There are a lot more updates than we can cover here, be sure to read the release notes for more details on all the fixes provided in this update.

As a reminder, you can get started by following our docs.microsoft.com tutorial, or preview the latest features by installing the Windows Community Toolkit Sample App from the Microsoft Store. If you would like to contribute, please join us on GitHub! To join the conversation on Twitter, use the #WindowsToolkit hashtag.

Happy coding!
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Source: Announcing Windows Community Toolkit v5.1 - Windows Developer Blog

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Brink · Feb 13, 2019

Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.1

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Today we are releasing the first update to the UWP Community Toolkit. To see the updates, first:

Get started with UWP Community Toolkit 1.1

Install the UWP Community Toolkit Sample App directly from the Windows Store

Read the documentation

In under a month since the first release, we are humbled by the positive feedback we have received so far and are excited to see all the contributions the community has made, including:

39 community contributors

188 accepted pull requests

173 issues closed

678 stars

159 forks

Thanks to all the contributors that were involved with this release!

Here’s a summary of what’s new in V1.1:

.NET Foundation. We are excited to announce that the UWP Community Toolkit has joined the .NET Foundation, a vibrant community of open-sourced projects focused on the future of the .NET ecosystem.

Updates and new features. The focus of this release is to improve the quality of the toolkit by addressing feedback we received through GitHub and the Store Sample App. Full list available in the Release Notes, including:

Services: added LinkedIn service (i.e. read user profile and share activity), Microsoft Graph service (i.e. send and read emails from UWP via Office 365 or explore Azure Active Directory graph) and updates to the Facebook and Bing services

Controls: added Blade, GridSplitter and DropShadowPanel controls

Animations: new FadeHeaderBehavior

Sample app. The UWP Community Toolkit Sample App has been updated to include the new features of this release. The Sample App is the best way to preview the features of the toolkit.

Documentation. As the project joins the .NET Foundation, we moved the documentation to a new location, directly connected to GitHub.

If you want to use it in your projects, visit the Getting Started page. If you are already using the toolkit, we recommend updating to the latest release.

You can find the roadmap of next release here.

If you have any feedback or are interested in contributing, see you on GitHub!

Download Visual Studio to get started!
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Source: Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.1 | Building Apps for Windows

Brink · Feb 13, 2019

Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.3

The UWP (Universal Windows Platform) Community Toolkit continues to grow at a rapid speed thanks to the ideas and contributions from the community. Over the last period, over 82 percent of the contributions came from the developer community (59 contributors). Thank you!Today, we are happy to announce the largest update to the toolkit since the launch a few months ago!

You can get started following these steps, or preview the latest features by installing the UWP Community Toolkit Sample App from the Windows Store.

As a reminder, the toolkit can be used in any app (across PC, Xbox One, Mobile, HoloLens and Surface Hub devices) targeting Windows 10 November Update (10.0.10586) or above. The few features that rely on newer OS updates are clearly marked in the documentation and in the Sample App.

Here’s just a summary of what’s new in Version 1.3:

Controls. Several new controls were added in this release, including some very popular requests from the community:

WrapPanel. Positions child elements in sequential position from left to right or top to bottom, breaking content to the next line.

TextboxMask and TextBoxRegex (attached properties). Allows setting common or custom masks (like telephone numbers) for input.

SurfaceDialTextboxHelper (attached property). Extends any Textbox control to be controlled directly from a Surface Dial.

MarkdownTextBlock. Embeds and renders in real-time markdown syntax.

TileControl. Enables repeatable tile content.

ScrollHeader. Builds upon FadeHeader and enables Quick Return, Sticky and Fade behaviors.

Expander. Provides an extendable container to show/hide any content by clicking the header.

AdvancedCollectionView: Builds upon CollectionView and easily sorts and filters collections before displaying them.

Loading control. Shows an animation with some content when the user should wait in some tasks of the app.

Services

OneDrive service. Roam user files through the new OneDrive service with a simplified API model (similar to StorageFolder). The new service makes it easy to authenticate OneDrive users and more in the same consistent way you have come to expect from the toolkit services.

Microsoft Translator Service. Translate text in 60 languages supported by Microsoft Translator Services. The free tier supports up to 2 million requests per month.

We’ve added support for geographical metadata to tweets.

Animations

Light. Add light effects to your page or controls to draw user attention.

Reorder grid animations (attached property). Add smooth animations when resizing a grid view.

ParallaxService. Allows to create a parallax effect for items contained within an element that scrolls like a ScrollViewer or ListView.

Notifications

New toast features. Allows group toasts notifications (only available on Creator Update).

Accessibility. With the support of the community, we started the journey to add accessibility capabilities to all the controls in the toolkit. You can track progress here.

Sample App

The Sample App now has embedded documentation (using the new Markdown control).

The Sample App provide pointers to a few external OSS resources, for example, the newly released Windows SDK for Google Analytics.

It is now available for preview on Xbox One.

UserVoice

The community can now submit and vote for new features on UserVoice.

If you are interested in contributing, please join us on Github!
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Source: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingap...y-toolkit-1-3/

Brink · Feb 13, 2019

Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.5

Today marks the sixth release of the UWP Community Toolkit – all packages are updated to version 1.5. Thanks to the UWP developer community, the UWP Community Toolkit has seen great improvements and stability to the existing controls and services. The community partnership has led to several new additions to this release.

To highlight a few of the new additions, the UWP Community Toolkit now includes:

Menu: A classic control used by traditional desktop applications, adapted for the Universal Windows Platform. As requested by the community on UserVoice, the Menu allows the developer to provide a hierarchical list of menus and submenus that support any input modality and can adapt to the screen size to provide a natural and fluid interaction.

OrbitView: A new ItemsControl that arranges elements around a center element and provides flexibility for size and distance for each element, as well as the ability to show orbits or anchors for each item.

RadialProgressBar: A XAML Control that displays a value within a range using a circular sector that grows clockwise until it becomes a full ring. A fantastic variation of the ProgressBar.

RoundImageEx: Similar to the ImageEx control, the RoundImageEx control downloads and locally caches images asynchronously while showing loading indicators. In addition, the RoundImageEx allows images to be clipped as circles.

ExpressionBuilder: A type-safe way to build powerful composition ExpressionAnimation.

BluetoothLEHelper: The BluetoothLEHelper class provides functionality to easily enumerate, connect to and interact with Bluetooth LE Peripherals.

For a complete overview of what’s new in version 1.5, please read our release notes on GitHub.

The release of Windows 10 Creators Update (build 10.0.15063) has enabled several new APIs that make it possible to improve several controls used in apps targeting the latest update. Therefore, several packages are now targeting the Windows 10 Creators Update and can take advantage of these new APIs. We encourage all developers using the toolkit to update their apps to the latest version of the UWP Community Toolkit.

As a reminder, the UWP Community Toolkit can be used in any UWP app across PC, Xbox One, mobile, HoloLens and Surface Hub devices. You can get started by following this tutorial, or preview the latest features by installing the UWP Community Toolkit Sample App from the Windows Store.

If you would like to contribute, please join us on GitHub!
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Source: Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.5 - Building Apps for Windows

Windows 10: Announcing Windows Community Toolkit v5.1

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Announcing Windows Community Toolkit v5.1

Announcing Windows Community Toolkit v5.1

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