Another update to the Windows Community Toolkit has arrived, packed with a myriad of enhancements and new features under version 7.1. As always these feature and enhancements are made possible thanks to the help and contributions of the dotnet developer community. If you’re unfamiliar with the Toolkit, it is a collection of helpers, extensions, and custom controls made for .NET, with the aim of giving developers a comprehensive set of controls to help them focus more on the experience and not necessarily having to worry about building the components necessary to make it happen.
Alright let’s dive into some of the updates!
Microsoft Identity and Microsoft Graph helpers
The Microsoft Graph offering has been overhauled and streamlined for 7.1, moving out of its previous preview phase, and has new helpers and providers for authenticating with Microsoft Identity and Graph APIs. The team received a lot of great feedback from the community, which they hope will help devs with authenticating users and calling Microsoft Graph APIs.
New UI/UX features
There is quite a bit of UI/UX goodness being releases with this version.
Features like Attached Shadows as demonstrated below by Twitter user XAML LLama
Is this a ???? dream? #UWP #WindowsDev look how simple adding shadows in #XAML will be in the upcoming 7.1 version of the #WindowsCommunityToolkit! Thanks to @RykenApps and the power of #Win2D! ???? pic.twitter.com/eSrEnNr2az
— XAML Llama ???? (@XAMLLlama) August 12, 2021
It doesn’t stop there however. Also new are AttachedCardShadow, RichSuggestBox, SmoothScrollIntoView among many other improvements!
The dotnet community is busy at work baking new features and fixes into the toolkit, for those of us building Windows applications it has been an invaluable time saving tool for creating amazing experiences and applications. There are many more improvements to read about with this release. To learn more, head over to the official announcement post from Michael A. Hawker at Windows Dev Blogs.
