Ed Charbeneau had the amazing opportunity to sit down and talk with Michael Crump and Clint Rutkas from Microsoft on Eat Sleep Code, the official Telerik podcast. Michael and Clint have been hard at work on Windows Template Studio, a new getting started experience for Universal Windows Platform. Check out the interview in its entirety with the SoundCloud embedded player and read the announcement that follows.
Ed Charbeneau had the amazing opportunity to sit down and talk with Michael Crump and Clint Rutkas from Microsoft on Eat Sleep Code, the official Telerik podcast. Michael and Clint have been hard at work on Windows Template Studio, a new getting started experience for Universal Windows Platform.
Getting Started with Windows Template Studio
02:05 CR: Okay, so Windows Template Studio is a... Helps out your File New experience. With UWP development, the templates basically that you have access to is a blank application. And for most developers, that could be a bit overwhelming and it helps... To build up a scaffolding for where you need to be can take multiple hours to just to get it functional when you're adding in, let's say six pages of background task, wanting live tiles. Let's say you wanna add in some, use the MVVM Light framework and add in suspend and resume. To do all that and to test it and validate, it takes multiple hours. We know this 'cause we actually asked one of our documentation experts to build an app and record it from start to finish. It took him about three hours. And we built out a dynamic generation tool that can do it in about 20 seconds with full clicking from start to finish.
04:55 EC: Let's try to visualize this for the folks listening. We're talking about Windows universal applications right now, so we're talking about the stuff that's in the Windows store, and you're running on your Windows desktop, HoloLens and things like that, right? So the UWP platform. And this is to augment the File New project experience where right now you get a blank application but it doesn't really do a whole lot. So you're saying it takes about three hours to build up something that's even moderately useful as a starter application. And in ASP.NET MVC, we have something that starts up. And we have things like Bootstrap installed, and some of the JavaScript libraries that we need. This Windows template studio gives us that experience, but there's a little bit more to it, right?
06:30 MC: Yeah. So if you clicked the universal Windows outs node, you only have blank app. There isn't the other additional pages top that's available for you out of the box, and that's really I think where we're trying to drop home here is that that is one of the needs that we saw also from the community. I think it was the number two ask from a community survey that we did was that, "There's stuff that was missing, it was in previous versions of Windows 8 and so forth. There was a couple of additional templates and then in Windows 10, you guys are just starting me out with blank. So can you help me, can you hold my hand just a little bit and get me up and let me actually scaffold a project with some of the things that is most common in universal Windows platform applications?" And that's why we start with selecting the project top, your classic blank to a navigation pane to pivots and tabs. To then you pick the framework what's best for you. If it's code behind which is the traditional method that if you select blank app, that's where you start from, or a third party framework such as MVVM Light and then obviously MVVM Basic. Those are the ones that's kind of baked in, and then from there, we drill down to the different pages and features that you could just select and add into your application.
10:51 CR: So the experience is very familiar. We work directly with the community and we ask them, "What is your favorite wizard?" and the overwhelmingly, everyone basically responded with, "We like the brand new Visual Studio 2017 installer wizard." So I believe it was Matt Lacey, produced a quick PowerPoint template that kind of outlined a bunch of the ideas that we had into a kind of functional wire frame and then I built it out in XAML really quick and then we made a fully functional version of it in about two weeks. So the wizard itself acts differently than the main Visual Studio installer, but the look and feel is very very similar. So the first page is you pick your project type and your framework. So these are basically your pillars that dictate everything else. So a project type would be do you want a nav pane or a pivot tab or just a blank do it... You're gonna do everything. And then the frameworks right now, the three frameworks we support are a generic MVVM framework, the stereotypical code behind method that classic Winform developers we're used to and MVVM Light. From that, you then go to your pages and features and then once you select what you want from both of those pages, you click 'generate' and Visual Studio then creates your project for you and you're off to the races coding.
12:30 MC: Yeah and I think one thing to kinda also touch on is getting this actually installed on your machine, is gonna be as easy as going out to the Visual Studio gallery and there you'll be able to search for it and you will download a Vise X installer and run that Vise X installer. And from there you'll be able to start seeing this new template once you go to your file in your project and select the universal windows outs I think is the title there.
13:27 CR: So, 100% this is open-source. It's hosted on GitHub. It's under the MIT license. We work directly with the community so we want an open and honest discussion with everyone so we don't make assumptions that aren't actually what everyone wants or feels as strongly on. So if anyone wants a new feature, our rules basically for contribution is open up an issue. Let's have a discussion and be sure that what is being built no one else is actually proactively working on the same things so that we don't duplicate effort but it's also what everyone feels is correct. So we were trying to maintain a quality bar that works across everyone. And also another great thing about this being open-source is, if your company wants to create custom templates that are very, very specialized, they can download the source code, set up their own template zip file, and point their own custom Vise X at that and then use our infrastructure basically to power that.
20:50 CR: It's a bit more complicated than just writing a page. The Windows Template Studio is actually powered under the hood by a Visual Studio template generator that's also open-source. And basically, what we have are a bunch of files that then dictate how everything else is generated. Imagine you have a bunch of includes almost and depending on where the code needs to get injected a couple different little tweaks have to happen. And you have to... If you add in a new page, be sure that the page follows the best practices or actually works with the code behind MVVM. The vanilla MVVM or the MVVM Light be sure that you're following all those practices. It's not as complex as you might think but it does take a little bit of re-engineering how you think you build something.
22:26 MC: So I will say the one thing that I think is important to talk about, that we haven't talked about yet, is that these templates, once you generate a template, a lot of the times as developers we kind of ignore some of the design aspects of things. We've worked with the design team here to make sure that when you generate an application that out of the box you don't have to worry about, "Oh how do I add a selection to show that this item has been selected?" or, "How many pixels does this need to be over?" or, "What is the standard colors here, what's the true light theme?" What are all of these things, out of the box it has that available for you and also, the triggers that will help you with different types of screen sizes. A lot of that is just baked in for free instead of worrying about, "Okay if I've got a small screen to a large screen, how does this application work or what have I got a wire up?" It's there for you. And also we've started some of the foundations there of adding in localization. So there is a file there that you can go ahead and you can take a look at but it will add in some of the basic for localization for you for some of the different text blocks and controls that are already in the application.
24:22 MC: Yeah and honestly, that type of stuff can consume a lot of your time and we would like for you to be able to at least get something up and going and start adding pages to it and obviously you may need to come back if you're adding some random pages, you need to make sure that those are also adhering to the design guidelines, but at least it's getting you... It's getting you there with at least the app that it scaffolds out.
That's it. If you want to redirect to your own page, write the detectation code under ActivationService.ActivateAsync(args) method. If you see the customer is not logged in. Call redirect login method. Here is the code from template studio about redirectlogin:
If you're a Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) fan (like I was years ago) or have used the Visual Studio IDE for that, you must've heard about Windows Template Studio (WTS). WebTS takes the same template-like process but the difference here is in the code project they output. While WTS was aimed to quickly build a UWP app, this time around they made WebTS to generate a boilerplate web app with cloud integration.
Prism now integrates with Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac to enable a highly productive developer workflow for creating WPF, UWP, and native iOS and Android applications using Xamarin.Forms. Jump start your Prism apps with code snippets, item templates, and project templates for your IDE of choice.
QuickStart Blank Prism Application - This template lets you create a Xamarin.Forms app for iOS and Android much like the Visual Studio for Windows template, but adds PropertyChanged.Fody, started icon assets, IDE configurations and option to incude UI tests. 2ff7e9595c
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