Thursday, May 31, 2018

TechBash 2018 - Early Bird 3-day and 4-day tickets now available

4-day (with Workshop) and 3-day early bird tickets are now on sale for TechBash 2018. This year TechBash will be held October 2-5, with the 2nd being a pre-conference day of full-day workshops for 4-day ticket holders only. These workshops will be presented by top experts in each area. The topics from which to choose are ASP.NET Core 2.1, DevOps, Docker and Azure for Developers. Get more workshop info here.

Early bird tickets will save up to 25% off the Standard ticket price this year. Don't wait because these prices will only be available for a few weeks and space in each workshop is limited. This year's keynote presenter is Scott Hunter, leader of the Visual Studio and .NET Teams at Microsoft, and these other speakers have already been confirmed:

  • Jeremy Likness
  • Jessica Deen
  • Richard Taylor
  • Chris Woodruff
  • Jeremy Clark
  • Anna Bateman
  • Brendan Enrick
  • John Wright
  • Ashley Grant
  • Ivana Veliskova
  • Steve Bohlen
  • Angel Thomas
  • Jim Wooley
  • Walt Ritscher
  • Paul Hacker
  • Jeff Fritz
  • Mitch Denny
  • Anoop Kumar

The full lineup will be announced soon. Get more info about TechBash here and buy your tickets today!

See you this fall at the Kalahari Resort in the Poconos! Get more info about TechBash's great room rates at the Kalahari on this page.


Friday, May 18, 2018

UWP Tip #19 - The Windows Community Toolkit

Hello UWP developers!

We take a quick break from our UWP Community Toolkit tips series because the toolkit has been given a new name this month! The UWP Community Toolkit is now called the Windows Community Toolkit.

The new name is a reflection of the renewed focus of the project - enabling Windows developers to quickly build awesome applications for Windows 10. The scope of the toolkit will be broadening to encompass controls, components and helpers for UWP, WPF, WinForm, Xamarin.Form and more. Long story short, if you are building for Windows and can consume a .NET Standard library, the Windows Community Toolkit aims to help you succeed.

Everything has been renamed - the documentation and the GitHub repository for now, and soon the sample app.

The next major update of the toolkit (v3.0) is coming soon. If you take a look at the milestones on GitHub, there's a code freeze for 3.0 on May 23rd and the target date for the release is May 30th. I see some interesting features in the list of issues for this release including a dark theme for the sample app and an InfiniteCanvas control.

Go check out the announcement on the Windows Developer Blog from earlier this month to get all the information about the name change. As soon as the new release is out, I'll be back with some more tips and tricks for using the new controls and helpers.

If you want to help build the toolkit, check out the list of open issues and submit a PR!