Microsoft released version 8.1 of the Windows Community Toolkit in August 2024. The new release has updated dependencies, .NET 8 support, two new controls and several changes to existing controls and helpers.
The Windows Community Toolkit (WCT) is a collection of controls and libraries that help Windows developers by providing additional features that the underlying platform doesn’t yet offer. Historically, the features provided by the toolkit were gradually incorporated into the Windows development platform itself.
The Windows Community Toolkit is not to be confused with the .NET Community Toolkit (NCT), which contains the common features of WCT that aren’t tied to any underlying UI platform.
There are no major changes in version 8.1. The most important ones are the updated dependencies and the older NuGet package redirects.
The dependencies of the toolkit are now updated to the latest versions, Windows App SDK 1.5 and Uno Platform 5.2. The minimum Windows target version is bumped to version 22621. This move allows WCT consumers to target .NET 8 features in their apps.
When WCT 8.0 was released last year, namespaces were rationalised to remove redundancies. In version 8.1, there are NuGet package redirects to point the code targeting version 7.x of the toolkit to the equivalent namespaces in version 8.x. For example, Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI.Controls.Primitives will now redirect to CommunityToolkit.Uwp.Controls.Primitives.
Beyond the new dependencies and package redirects, there are several new features in the updated version. The most prominent ones are the ColorPicker and the ColorPickerButton controls. They were previously available in WCT 7.x and now are ported back again with Fluent WinUI look-and-feel and several bug fixes.
Another control ported from version 7.x is the TabbedCommandBar. It has been also updated with new WinUI styles and a bug regarding accent colour change was fixed in this new version.
Minor fixes in version 8.1 include making camera preview helpers work with Windows Apps SDK, support for custom brushes to act as overlays for ImageCropper control, and new spacing options for DockPanel control.
The migration process for the users of the older 7.X version of the WCT involves updating the TargetFramework property in the .csproj file and the publishing profile to point to the new version of Windows SDK.
Microsoft recommends developers check and contribute to the Windows Community Toolkit Labs, a repository for pre-release and experimental features that aren’t stable enough for the main WCT repository. Still, the issue of several controls dropped in the move from version 7 to version 8 of the toolkit is a source of frustration for WCT developers.
Version 8.1.240821 was pre-released on June 6th 2024 and released for general availability on August 22nd 2024. The source code for the toolkit is available on GitHub.