Microsoft has officially launched the .NET Community Toolkit, providing developers with a collection of helpers and APIs for .NET developers, independent of any UI platform. Microsoft said an updated version of the MVVM (model-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 on August 4, following a preview phase that began in January. The MVVM Toolkit includes new source generators intended to significantly reduce the 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 improved, and messaging APIs have also been improved for MVVM applications.
The .NET Community Toolkit 8.0.0 also brings improvements to the diagnostics package. The toolkit is accessible from GitHub.
Although labeled as version 8.0.0, this is actually the first release of the .NET Community Toolkit. The reason for this version naming is that all of the toolkit libraries were originally part of the Windows Community Toolkit, a collection of wizards, extensions, and controls to simplify development on the Windows platform. Universal (UWP) and .NET apps 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 into a separate project. The last version of Windows Community Toolkit before branching was 7.1.x; Microsoft decided to follow the same versioning.
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