Credit: Dreamstime
Microsoft has officially launched the .NET Community Toolkit, providing developers with a collection of helpers and APIs for .NET developers, agnostic of any UI platform.
Redmond said an updated release of the MVVM (model-view view-model) Toolkit is the biggest new feature in the toolkit.
A spin-off of the Windows Community Toolkit, .NET Community Toolkit 8.0.0 was announced August 4, following a preview phase that began in January.
Included with the MVVM Toolkit are new source generators intended to greatly reduce boilerplate code for setting up an application leveraging MVVM. These generators have been rewritten to run faster than before. Writing observable properties has been simplified, C# development enhanced, and messenger APIs have been improved for MVVM applications as well.
The .NET Community Toolkit 8.0.0 also brings improvements to the diagnostics package. The toolkit can be accessed from GitHub.
Although tagged as version 8.0.0, this is actually the first release of .NET Community Toolkit. The reason for this version naming is all the libraries in the toolkit originally were part of Windows Community Toolkit, a collection of helpers, extensions, and controls to simplify development of Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and .NET applications for Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Due to the growing need for APIs targeting .NET without Windows-specific dependencies, Microsoft decided to split these APIs off into a separate project. The last version of Windows Community Toolkit prior to the branching out was 7.1.x; Microsoft decided to follow the same versioning.
