In my last post “First steps with WinUI 3” I already mentioned the “WinUI 3 Gallery”-App, but I missed mentioning two great resources.

If you take a deeper look at the “Home” page, you will spot the Community Toolkit Gallery (another app) and the “Template Studio for WinUI”.

What is the Community Toolkit?

The Community Toolkit is a community-driven collection of components and other helpers.

The “home” of the Community Toolkit can be found on GitHub

As of today, the Community Toolkit seems “alive” with recent commits in February 2024.

Interesting fact: The controls from the toolkit seems to work with the Uno Platform as well.

What is the Template Studio?

Template Studio is an addin for Visual Studio and can be installed from the Marketplace.

This adds the ‘Template Studio for WinUI’ template to Visual Studio:

After the usual “pick a name and location” you will be greeted with this Wizard:

The first step is to select a “Project type”:

In the next step you choose a “Design pattern” - which has only one item… well.

In “Pages” you can create your “views/pages” based on a given layout:

Some pages can only be added once (e.g. the “Settings”), but most pages can be added multiple times.

In “Features” you can add some WinUI 3 related features:

In the last setting you can decide if you want to add an MSTest project as well:

The result is the following Visual Studio solution, which includes two projects and a number of TODO items:

If you run the code a pretty simple app with your configured pages will be found:

Warning: Such code generators might be a good starting point, but (as always with such generators) the code might be “too stupid” or “too complicated” - depending on your needs.

Any other useful resource?

I’m a newbie with WinUI 3. The Community Toolkit looks promising and even the Template Studio looks good - at least from a few minutes playtime. If anyone has other useful resource: Please let me know (e.g. in the comments or via email).

Hope this helps!