Microsoft releases UWP Community Toolkit 1.4

Today’s release of the UWP Community Toolkit is the fourth, bringing it up to version 1.4. In it, the team has added a few improvements for the controls added in 1.3 as well as some new developers tools.

Here is a list of the new features:

1. Carousel: A new control that presents items in a list, where the selected item is always in the center and other items are flowing ­around it. This reacts not only to the content but also to layout changes, so it can adapt to different form factors automatically. The carousel can be horizontal or vertical.
2. ViewExtensions: ApplicationViewExtensions, StatusBarExtensions & TitleBarExtensions provide a declarative way of setting AppView, StatusBar & TitleBar properties from XAML.
3. NetworkHelper: Provides functionality to monitor changes in network connection, and allows users to query for network information without additional lookups.
4. Saturation: Provides a behavior to selectively saturate a XAML element. We also introduced the CompositionBehaviorBase to ease creation of new composition-based behaviors (Blur now uses this).
5. Twitter streaming API support: Twitter Service was missing support for Twitter’s streaming service; we added support for live tweets and events.
6. Search box for Sample App: The new Sample App allows you to search for a sample directly from the main menu.

The toolkit also includes a new ‘dev only’ projects called Microsoft.Toolkit.UWP.DeveloperTools including a Focus Tracker to display information about your application’s focus control and the Alignment Grid to align controls on the page.

The full changelog can be read on GitHub where the open source UWP Community Toolkit is available for download as well.