UWP Tip #3 - UWP Community Toolkit - Part 1, What's in the Box?

Once upon a time, Microsoft released a set of free controls for WPF developers. It was called the WPF Toolkit. It contained components such as DataGrid, DatePicker, Calendar, AutoCompleteBox, and a Chart control. Today's XAML developer would consider these to be basics that would be in the box with their framework. At the time, we saw them as a saving grace. The Extended WPF Toolkit took it a step further, but that's a tale for another blog.

Today's UWP offers these types of controls and much more with File-->New Project-->Blank App. Accordingly, today's toolkit delivers richer, more advanced tools.

Last August, hot on the heels of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Microsoft announced the UWP Community Toolkit. Earlier this month, the UWP Community Toolkit v1.5 was released. Unlike the WPF Toolkit of yesterday, this toolkit is about more than UI controls. Sure, it has controls. It has some pretty useful controls:

• AdaptiveGridView - A grid to better handle today's wide variety of form factors.
• HeaderedTextBlock - A read-only header/text combination.
• HamburgerMenu - This has become a staple of modern app design.
• ImageEX - Loads images async with a loading indicator, plus support for caching. My favorite control in the current collection.
• RotatorTile - Similar to a live tile within your app.
• PullToRefreshListView - All the cool kids with iOS love Pull to Refresh. Now your users will too.
• RadialGauge - Everyone love a gauge control. This one is just what you expect.
• RangeSelecter - A slider with two points for selecting a value range.
• SlideableListItem - Slide your list items left or right to take actions on them. This has become a more common UX, especially in mobile email clients.
• BladeControl - You know the Azure Portal? Those blade that slide back and forth as you navigate through sections. Yes, you can create that same experience in your apps now.

In addition to controls, the toolkit provides:

• Code Helpers - A trove of helper methods for things like storage, streams, color handling, and converters for data binding.
• Services - Get started with social and search services in your app.
• Animations - Quickly add cool visual effects to your application.
• Notifications - Live Tiles and Toast notifications created with ease.

Each part of the toolkit can be downloaded to your project via its NuGet Package, making it easy to pick and choose which parts of the toolkit you'll want to leverage in your app without adding unnecessary bloat. To get started, just manage the NuGet packages for your UWP project and search for "Microsoft.Toolkit.UWP":

Each package's description has enough information to easily identify which of them you will want to download to your project. You'll get any other dependent packages also… because Nuget. 

The entire UWP Community Toolkit is Open Source. If there is something in the toolkit that needs a fix or enhancement, add an issue, fork it, create a pull request. You know the drill by now.

Next time, in UWP Tip #4, we will start building an application with the UWP Community Toolkit. In the coming weeks, I will examine the different parts of the toolkit over a series of posts.

In the meantime, go check it out for yourself!

del.icio.us Tags: uwp community toolkit,uwp,open source,wpf

UWP Tip #2 - Windows Template Studio - Examining the Project

Introduction

In Tip #1, I created a new UWP project with a template from Windows Template Studio v1.1. The app is a Navigation Pane style project that uses MVVMLight and contains Web Views to display three different websites.

Let's take a look at a few aspects of the generated project.

NuGet Packages

Besides the basic UWP NuGet package, three other packages were added to my project when it was created.

• Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI.Controls - Part of the UWP Community Toolkit
• Microsoft.Xaml.Behaviors.Uwp.Managed - XAML Behaviors
• MvvmLight - Our MVVM toolkit of choice

Views

Views were created for the application's shell, the main page which is generated without any content, and my three Web Views.

• ShellPage.xaml
• MainPage.xaml
• MorningDewPage.xaml
• UWPTipsPage.xaml
• WPFTipsPage.xaml

The ShellPage contains the Hamburger menu & Navigation Tree on the left side and the content panel on the right side to host each of other views in the project.

Each web view contains some style code for in the Page.Resources for styling the browser buttons. If you have multiple web views, this XAML could be centralized and reused across your pages. There is also some code for handling the loading behaviors, visibility, and the WebView (Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls.WebView) itself.

The MainPage is essentially empty with the exception of some Xaml to handle the VisualStates. I added a couple of TextBlocks with a welcome message and some information about navigating to the other pages.

ViewModels

There are ViewModels corresponding to each view listed above. There is another for ShellNavigationItem. This facilitates handling multiple pages in the navigation app without hard-coding them in the Shell's view somewhere. There is also a ViewModelLocator class, which will be familiar to anyone who has used MVVMLight. This answer on StackOverflow does a great job of explaining its purpose.

The ShellViewModel uses the ShellNavigationItem and a NavigationServiceEx to switch between the views of its main content panel.

private void Navigate(object item)
{
    var navigationItem = item as ShellNavigationItem;
    if (navigationItem != null)
    {
        NavigationService.Navigate(navigationItem.ViewModelName);
    }
}

Most of the code in the ViewModels for each web view is dedicated to handling. I would recommend refactoring most of this code out to a common base class if you are going to be working with more than one or two web views in a project. Much of the logic is centered around handling navigation between websites and web pages within the WebView control: browsing forward/back, retry, refresh, etc.

Services and Helpers

There are two service classes in the project, ActivationService and NavigationServiceEx. Let's start with the NavigationServiceEx used by the Shell. Here's the class diagram of this service.

It contains all you need to browse between your child views, including browser-style back/forward functionality.

The ActivationService encapsulates our app's activation behavior and its back stack in Windows, working with the NavigationServiceEx for this.

Wrap-Up

The project I generated with Windows Template Studio, created a great starting point for application that can be used to navigate a few different websites. If you create something similar, I would recommend some refactoring to reduce code duplication between Views and ViewModels of the same type. This will lead to much greater maintainability moving forward. Otherwise, it's a really solid way to get started on your next project.

Happy coding!

del.icio.us Tags: uwp,windows template studio,mvvm light,uwp community toolkit

UWP Tip #1 - Build Your First App with Windows Template Studio

Welcome to the Tip #1 here on UWP Tips!

Do you have an idea for an relatively simple app but just don't have the time to get it off the ground? Maybe you have a web site or blog, and you would like to add an app that surfaces the existing web UI. Even the simplest of apps requires a great deal of infrastructure code be built up front, right?

Windows Template Studio

Earlier this year, the WinDev team at Microsoft unveiled Windows Template Studio, a Visual Studio extension that makes UWP app development accessible to more developers.

After installing the extension, select the new project type for Windows Template Studio (Universal Windows) found under Windows Universal. This will start a wizard-style experience to select the frameworks, pages and features to be added to your application.

The Wizard

I elected to create a Navigation Pane project using MVVMLight instead of the code-behind model for my app. I also added three Web View pages for my three blogs, named UWPTips, WPFTips and MorningDew.

Upon completing the wizard, the solution is loaded in Visual Studio 2017. Each view, in addition to the Main and Shell views, is generated along with a corresponding ViewModel.

Each of my Web View ViewModels has a constant defined for the initial web page to load into the View.

private const string defaultUrl = "https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps";

Change each of these to the desired starting web Url for that View.

private const string defaultUrl = "http://www.uwpapp.tips";

I made one additional change to the generated project. In the PopulateNavItems() method of ShellViewModel, I updated the symbols used as icons in the left navigation bar for each page. By default, each was using Symbol.Document. I changed this to make each page's symbol unique and more identifiable.

_primaryItems.Add(new ShellNavigationItem("Shell_Main".GetLocalized(), Symbol.Home, typeof(MainViewModel).FullName));
_primaryItems.Add(new ShellNavigationItem("Shell_UWPTips".GetLocalized(), Symbol.Pictures, typeof(UWPTipsViewModel).FullName));
_primaryItems.Add(new ShellNavigationItem("Shell_WPFTips".GetLocalized(), Symbol.PreviewLink, typeof(WPFTipsViewModel).FullName));
_primaryItems.Add(new ShellNavigationItem("Shell_MorningDew".GetLocalized(), Symbol.Link, typeof(MorningDewViewModel).FullName));

The items in the Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls.Symbol enum correspond to glyphs from the Segoe MDL2 Assets font. More information is available on Microsoft Docs.

Here is a look at the app running on Windows 10 with the Creators Update. The left navigation hamburger menu has been expanded to reveal the page names, otherwise only the glyph icons appear. The WPFTips page has rendered the current content of www.wpf.tips.

The status bar area of each web view page contains basic navigation buttons for back, forward and reload plus a button to open the current page in your default browser. These web views are hosted in an embedded Microsoft Edge browser control. While an app that hosts three blog sites may not be a worthy addition to the Store, it could be made more useful by displaying individual blog posts in a 'reading mode' with sidebars, headers and footers from the sites hidden. This application style might be even more useful hosting pages containing document repositories or other online libraries.

Windows Template Studio v1.1 was just released last month, containing a number of additions, enhancements and fixes. The entire project is open source, with the source available on GitHub. Go check it out today and build something awesome!

Next time, in Tip #2, we will take a closer look at the code generated for my AppTips project and what is going on under the covers to navigate around the app.

del.icio.us Tags: uwp,windows template studio,windows 10,microsoft edge,visual studio