It’s with great pleasure today that we announce the next update to the Windows Community Toolkit, version 5.1, made possible with help and contributions from our developer community. This update brings high-quality animation support with the inclusion of Lottie-Windows in the toolkit. In addition, it provides a control for choosing Remote Devices, a new Image Cropping control, and many control accessibility fixes.
See more details on these features below.
Animations with Lottie-Windows
This new library provides high quality animation support on Windows 10 (1809) by utilizing the Windows.UI.Composition APIs and allows for the consumption of Bodymovin JSON files or optimized code-generated classes for playback in your Windows apps. It is the successor to the LottieUWP community project.
Try installing the new Lottie Viewer app from the Microsoft Store to test out animations and generate optimized code for your Windows apps.
Documentation for Lottie-Windows.
Remote Device Picker
The Remote Device Picker allows a user to select a device, proximally or cloud accessible, from a dialog. The app can then use this information to perform various scenarios like opening and communicating with an app on the chosen device. Read more about what’s possible after selecting a device like opening an app or creating an app service.
This is possible with Project Rome which allows building people-centric experiences across devices and platforms (Android, Windows, iOS). For examplehaving your app or website (using MS Graph APIs) continue a task to another device or create companion experiences that can communicate with each other across devices, like a remote control.
Documentation for RemoteDevicePicker. Read more about Project Rome capabilities here.
Image Cropper
The new Image Cropper control allows you to provide effortless image cropping functionality to your app. Perfect for user selected profile pictures and photo editing tools.
Documentation for ImageCropper.
Accessibility Improvements
We’ve been striving to increase the accessibility of our controls in the last release and this one. This update provides more fixes to keyboard navigation, high contrast, and narrator readability to the toolkit controls.
.NET Core 3.0 Preview for WPF and WinForms Packages
With the recent release of .NET Core 3.0 preview 2, we’ve shipped a toolkit 6.0 preview package for our WPF/WinForms library Microsoft.Toolkit.Win32 to support it. Please download it here for WPF or WinForms to give it a try in your .NET Core applications. Report any issues here.
Get started today
There are a lot more updates than we can cover here, be sure to read the release notes for more details on all the fixes provided in this update.
As a reminder, you can get started by following our docs.microsoft.com tutorial, or preview the latest features by installing the Windows Community Toolkit Sample App from the Microsoft Store. If you would like to contribute, please join us on GitHub! To join the conversation on Twitter, use the #WindowsToolkit hashtag.
Happy coding!
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