Microsoft continues to prepare for the forthcoming Fall Creators Update for Windows 10, and they are upgrading developers tools and resources as part of these preparations. Visual Studio 2017 (15.4) brought support for UWP apps to use .NET Standard 2.0. Now the UWP Community Toolkit (UCT) has been updated to take advantage of Microsoft's new Fluent Design Language that will eventually become the new user interface for Windows 10.
The UCT provides Windows 10 developers and those interested in the platform a way to see how a UWP app is built and try out the various controls available under the UWP platform. Coming in UCT 2.0 is the addition of four new controls: InAppNotification, TextToolbar, Expander, and Menu. The Menu control has been updated to support underline characters and non-string contents. Alongside this are improved animations and behaviors when the menu is non-default locations.
The InAppNotification control provides a way for UWP apps to produce a notification window similar to the one offered in Internet Explorer when downloading a file. The TextToolbar control provides the ability to edit RichText or Markdown formatted text. This control also supports the ability to use a custom defined Formatter object to add support for additional formats.
With the switch to version 2 of the UCT, VS2015 is no longer supported and developers will need to use VS2017. Documentation on getting started with UCT is available and the sample app built to demonstrate UCT is available in the Windows Store. The source code behind the toolkit is available on GitHub under the MIT License along with the full release notes. (The sample app itself is written in C#.)
