2022 Release Plans 📝

[michael-hawker]

8.0 has been released, see more info and new repo here

2022 Release Plans

Main Theme: Releases focused on restructuring our processes and systems for development of the Toolkit for the foreseeable future.

Secondary Themes:

• Improving overall Contribution & Development Processes
• Revitalizing and re-working our Documentation system
• Reworking and providing a long-term Sample infrastructure integrated with our documentation.

High-level Summary

Current Problems:

• Infrastructure tied specifically to UWP based development
• Maintaining two independent branches for WinUI 3/Windows App SDK support and UWP
• Toolkit quality bar has increased making it harder to iterate on prototypes and experiments in existing repo
• Iterating on PRs can take a while to reach all requirements to merge and ship, meaning they’re left stagnate and not easily usable by the community to provide feedback on

Solutions:

• Re-evaluate our process and systems for development and maintenance of the Toolkit
• Inherently target multiple (yet similar) platforms that are based on UWP-flavored XAML
• Re-work infrastructure to streamline both experimental development and maintenance of a high-quality codebase, now used by thousands of applications with millions of users.

Next Steps

Our plans for this year have two main components needed to be successful:

1. ~Q2 2022 - Create 🧪 Toolkit Labs for Windows 💻

   • Place to prototype, experiment, and collaborate on new features
   • Onboard feature from idea to well-tested ship-ready code
   • Natural, streamlined developer experience focused on your feature
   • Complementary repo to the Windows Community Toolkit
   • Multi-targeted for UWP, WinUI 3, and Uno
   • Easily explored through Codespaces in the browser

2. ~H1 2023 - 8.0 Release – Rename Windows Community Toolkit Repo to CommunityToolkit/Windows

   • Leverage new tooling/improvements for project structure/samples/documentation/testing from Toolkit Labs for Windows.
   • Maintain a single branch for all platform targets (e.g. UWP and WinUI 3)
   • Ship all targeted platforms in a single NuGet package and namespace under CommunityToolkit.WinUI.*
     • Simplifies documentation and samples across platforms
     • Enables library and app developers to multi-target platforms and share XAML
     • Aids in transitions from UWP to WinUI 3 in the long-term.
   • Seeded with code from our existing winui branch.
   • Rename/Migrate or Archive existing CommunityToolkit/WindowsCommunityToolkit repo when migration is completed.

You can find out more information about the specific plans for each of these initiatives in the links to their issues in the titles above.

You can use this discussion for general Q&A about our upcoming plans or dive into the specific Toolkit Labs for Windows or 8.0 Release issues for specific feedback or questions.

If you are interested in helping us setup or provide feedback on the upcoming Toolkit Labs experience, please let us know on the Labs issue.

[mrlacey]

This strikes me as one of those plans that if you've never tried it before, you'd assume that it will take a couple of weeks at most. But, if you have done something similar then allowing a few months is actually realistic.

The Labs plan and work is either very vague or unexpectedly secretive. The linked information is at a high level. That one of the last things on the list of actions is "Make repo Public" makes me wonder how much the community are involved with this "community" project. Can you add a link to more details around this? Or explain why it's all happening in private?

[michael-hawker]

Indeed, we expect this to take a few months to get done right. We're using Labs to frontload a lot of investigations around re-working our infrastructure.

We're happy to discuss and work on our plans with Labs with our community, and even bring members of our community we've worked with before into helping us with the project (as mentioned at the end of the discussion here and the Labs issue).

The main reason we are keeping the repository private at the beginning is that we don't want to have it bombarded with issues, new features or requests until all the templates and infrastructure are in place for it to function as intended and be maintained. Once this initial setup of the repository is done and we have written down its guidance, we plan to release it.

The Labs project and how we're trying to build it and why are a culmination of what we've learned working with the community over the project's lifespan. That's also why we're sharing these plans and directions now with the community, as we've done. To show a path forward for the success of the Toolkit and how we can work better together now and in the future.

[Nirmal4G]

...we don't want to have it bombarded with issues...

If you don't want issues to be opened, you can disable the issues (or restrict issues to only org members) in the repository settings and enable them later. Although PRs can't be disabled, I think!

[cesarchefinho]

Hi everyone

I have a proposal to communitytoolkit that i already implemented and i want to contribute to community toolkit

can someone look for https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/WindowsCommunityToolkit/issues/4544 ?

If you aprove i want to submit my code

thanks

[RoMiOb]

Hi everyone.
The MS announcements mentioned that the toolkit will work also with WPF so I was happy to hear that this should make MVVM easier for me. But trying to use it ended with cryptic error messages. Digging for a solution I found that using the toolkit always focusses on UWP without any word about using it with WPF. So my question: Can I use the toolkit with WPF and where can I find examples for that which explain what preconditions I have to consider?

[niels9001]

Hi @RoMiOb , the MVVM Toolkit was migrated to a standalone toolkit - part of the .NET Community Toolkit. It is framework agnostic and works with WPF!

You can find more information here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/communitytoolkit/mvvm/

[RoMiOb]

Thank you very much for your quick support