Microsoft's Windows Template Studio is a tool meant to simplify development of apps built on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which it launched over a year ago. The company has been working continuously on improving it since its launch, with many updates being released over time. Today, it's version 2.5 that's being pushed out, and while it doesn't include any major new features, it does bring a few improvements to the overall experience.
Among the new additions, there's support for the latest release of Visual Studio, VS 2019, and some performance improvements. Here's what's new:
- Improved startup time splitting templates by platform/language
- Improved guidance on Suspend and Resume feature
- Support for VS 2019
- Bug fixes
- Navigation View uses WinUI Library
- Pages updated with current Fluent guidance
In recent updates, Microsoft also added support for multiple ink pages and a page for data grids from the Windows Community Toolkit. Speaking of which, the latest version of Template Studio brings some updates to the development platform as well, including Windows Community Toolkit 5.0.0. Here are all the changes:
- Updated target platform version to 10.0.17763.0 and min target version to 10.0.17134.0
- Updated Microsoft.NETCore.UniversalWindowsPlatform to 6.1.9
- AdaptiveCards to 1.1.0
- AppCenter.Analytics and Microsoft.AppCenter.Crashes to 1.10.0
- UI.for.UniversalWindowsPlatform 1.0.1.2
- MVVMLight to 5.4.1.1
- Windows Community Toolkit to 5.0.0
If you already have the Windows Template Studio installed in Visual Studio, it should be updated to the latest version automatically. If you haven't yet, you can always get it from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
Microsoft also detailed some of the changes it's working on for future releases. These include Azure-related features, though the company didn't specify what those are.
- Work for supporting multiple projects in a single solution
- Menubar navigation pattern template
- Identity Login
- Improved Visual Studio 2019 support
- Adaptive Grid page
- Azure features starting to be added in
If you're interested in seeing the full list of changes made to Windows Template Studio as they happen, you can check out the official GitHub page for the project. You can also make your own contributions to it by suggesting new ideas and features.
