🧪 Windows Community Toolkit Labs 💻

[michael-hawker]

Windows Community Toolkit Labs has launched! 🎉

• Blog Post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/ifdef-windows/announcing-the-windows-community-toolkit-labs/
• Repo: https://aka.ms/toolkit/labs/windows
• Website: https://toolkitlabs.dev/

Original plans left below.

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Read more about our 2022 Release Plan summary on the discussion here.

The 8.0 Release Plan issue is tracked here.

~June 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

Details

As we announced previously, Toolkit Labs are spaces where it is easier to prototype and experiment on new ideas for toolkits, as well as more easily collaborate on these ideas with others. In this phase, we will create a dedicated repo for all things related to our Windows specific technologies to complement our Windows Community Toolkit repo.

It will provide a new infrastructure which allows for easy onboarding to provide incremental value when going from an idea to a sample to testing and documentation. It also has infrastructure to focus on a single component during development or aggregate them as a whole experience for discovery.

This Toolkit Labs for Windows experience is also built with multi-targeting in mind to let new components have the broadest reach possible, as well as hooking our dev loop into an easy accessible fashion with the web.

Each project by default will target UWP, WinUI 3, and Uno.

Codespaces will let a developer easily try out and review new features within their browser.

Issue Breakdown for Toolkit Labs for Windows 🧪

• Prototype new development experience for Labs
• New Project Template Investigation
• Setup initial sample app infrastructure
• Multi-target with WinUI 3
• Multi-target with Uno + WinUI 2
• Display Sample Code
• Provide system for hooking options panel to samples
• Move to private staging within Toolkit Org
• Enable Nullables
• Uno + WinUI 3 (Investigating w/ Uno + WinUI 2?)
• Testing across platforms.
• Documentation Display/Template
• Update Project Templates
• Update GitHub Issue Templates
• Add CI infrastructure
  • Investigate package versioning systems
• Add another experiment case or two, candidates:
  • CanvasLayout
  • GridSplitter/ContentSizer/PropertySizer Refactor 🚧 SizerBase class for GridSplitter + new ContentSizer and PropertySizer components #4083
  • CanvasView A CanvasView Control #854
  • Messenger Behaviors [Feature] Behaviors for WeakReferenceMessenger and StrongReferenceMessenger Labs-Windows#238
  • Grid Layout/Flow Extensions Enable Grid to dynamically switch layouts Labs-Windows#232
• Update Readme/Docs on process
• Make repo Public
• Tag existing PRs that we'd like to move to Labs

If you are interested in helping us setup or provide early feedback on the upcoming Toolkit Labs experience, please let us know in a comment below or reacting with the 👀 emoji.

[Nirmal4G]

I'm interested in build infra side of things and I have some ideas about repo structure.

[Nirmal4G]

Any update on the labs repo? I don't see it in the org page.

[michael-hawker]

@Nirmal4G we got a bit delayed with getting the initial labs infrastructure up and running. We've been making progress though, and I hope in a couple of weeks we can start inviting some folks in to help us try some things out before launch. We just want to make sure we have all the layout of solutions and templating stuff figured out so that if we have to change anything later it's hopefully fairly minimal or related to the main sample app vs. having to modify across every experiment we've made.