The UWP Community Toolkit is a collection of helper functions, custom controls, and app services. It simplifies and demonstrates common developer tasks building UWP apps for Windows 10.
The toolkit can be used to build UWP apps for any Windows 10 device, including PC, Mobile, XBOX, IoT and HoloLens. You can also use the toolkit with an existing desktop app converted to UWP using the Desktop Bridge.
The UWP Community Toolkit is available as a Visual Studio NuGet package for new or existing C# and VB.NET projects. Read the Getting Started page for all the details.
You can also preview the capabilities of the toolkit by downloading the UWP Community Toolkit Sample App in the Windows Store.
Go here for more information about the UWP toolkit. The downloadable application shows all the controls in action and provides all the sample code you need to get started. The project is open source and hosted on GitHub so there is no monetary cost to the end user to use them, the source code is freely available and you can contribute your own controls back to the community.
If you don’t want to download the sample application to your computer you can also check the samples out at the Toolkit Documentation part of the site.
Currently I haven’t had a chance to use them in any of my current projects because I mainly work in WPF. However I have one active project that I plan to use a few of them with in the next month or so.
I do wish that Microsoft had found a way to have some kind of forward / backward compatibility from WPF to Windows 10 UWP applications because I prefer the UWP way to do things. In fact so much so that I would give up a lot of what WPF has to offer to adopt it completely but the apps I build for work run on about 70 different computers and only about 10% happen to be running Windows 10. So it isn’t really even an option for me outside of a few sample / proof of concept applications.
