Kickstart your next UWP App with new Code Snips and Windows App Studio OSS Libs

You've maybe seen the apps you can create with the Windows App Studio? Thought it would be cool if you could create app's like that, without the Windows App Studio? That you just want the components behind Windows App Studio to glue them together how you want? Well here you go!

Kickstart UWP app creation with Windows App Studio’s open source UWP libraries and Samples App

Windows App Studio is all about making it as easy as possible to build apps for Windows.  The online tool helps you build apps with no coding required, so you can either start your project there and extend it in Visual Studio, or you can create and build the app completely in the tool.  Today, we want to talk about another way we’re helping to make it easier to develop for Windows 10: Our Windows App Studio UWP Samples app, which is powered by our open source UWP Controls and Data Sources libraries.  Open source libraries are incredibly useful in software development, but one of the tougher things for developers is to find good documentation and examples of code in those libraries without firing up an IDE.  The UWP Samples app aims to solve this problem and showcase the contents of the libraries beautifully and in an interactive way.

...

A bit of background. As we build out and add new features to Windows App Studio, we need to create controls and data sources that are standardized in a way that makes them work for the tool.  This standardization of the controls also makes it easy to package them in a library, so that’s exactly what we did.  There are two main libraries:

• Windows App Studio UWP Controls
• Windows App Studio Data Sources

Each of these are open source with the MIT license and are available as NuGet packages and these are the libraries that power the UWP Samples app.  You are free to use anything in these libraries for any project and you don’t even need to assign attribution/credit.  Since they’re open source, you are enthusiastically invited to contribute new controls, data sources, and whatever else you think is great.

Windows App Studio UWP Samples app

The Windows App Studio UWP Samples app is now available in the Windows Store. What is unique about the app is that it lets you browse through all of the controls and data sources included in the libraries, without needing to write one line of code.  You can even adjust the attributes of the controls to mimic how they would look in your app before opening Visual Studio.  Furthermore, the app has the code and descriptions for each of the controls and data sources in the libraries, so you can even copy and paste directly from there.

...

wasteam/waslibs

Windows App Studio Libraries

This repository contains the source code of the libraries used in Windows App Studio to create our generated apps.

A sample implementation of these libraries is available in the Windows Store: Windows App Studio Uwp Samples. You can see the implementation details in the source code.

There are three libraries: DataProviders, Uwp and Common. The libraries are also available as Nuget packages.

...

Table of Contents

• Uwp Library
  • Layout Controls
    • ResponsiveGridView
    • Pivorama
    • VariableSizedGrid
    • Carousel
    • SectionList
    • SplitterCard
  • Foundation Controls
    • VisualBreakpoints
    • ImageEx
    • VirtualBox
    • RelativeBox
    • RelativeBox and VirtualBox
    • SearchBox
  • App Services
    • Navigation
    • AppCache
  • Utilities
    • ErrorNotification
    • ActionsCommandBar
    • AnimationExtensions
    • Converters
• Data Providers Library
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • YouTube
  • WordPress
  • Rss
  • Bing
  • LocalStorage
• Common

Uwp Library

This library contains XAML controls for Windows 10 apps only.

...

Like you, I hate to reinvent the wheel, so when I saw this post, I had to make sure to include it in my next UWP dev related post...

Windows task snippets

Snippets of ready-to-use code that accomplish small but useful tasks of interest to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app developers. These snippets represent simple solutions to common problems, and simple recipes to help you implement new app features.

Every snippet includes the using statements that it requires, which you can add to the top of your file as needed.

Each snippet is written in C# unless otherwise indicated. Click the GitHub link to go directly to the source code, and the doc link for some background.

...

Microsoft/Windows-task-snippets

Windows task snippets

This repo collects snippets of ready-to-use code that accomplish small but useful tasks of interest to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app developers. These snippets represent simple solutions to common problems, and simple recipes to help you implement new app features.

Each snippet includes the using statements that it requires, which you can add to the top of your file as needed.

Each snippet is written in C# unless otherwise indicated.

For more UWP samples, see Windows on GitHub.

Snippets

Data binding

Data binding change notification
Data-bind an InkCanvas control

Files and folders

File exists
Preserve access to a folder
Launch executable

Colors

Colors as a collection
Convert hex to color
Convert RGB to HSV

UI thread

UI thread access from background thread
UI thread task await from background thread
UI updates with a timer

Sockets

Socket programming with TCP
Socket programming with UDP

Popups

Show pop-up asking user to rate app
Show dialog box

Miscellaneous

App version and title
Bing image-of-the-day URI
Clipboard text
Convert the DPI of rectangles (C++)
Play sound once or looped

Follow @CH9
Follow @coding4fun
Follow @gduncan411