Windows Template Studio

Remember App Studio? Well, Microsoft has taken the same approach and announced Windows Template Studio. The new Windows Template Studio provides an easy way to jump start your application project to target Universal Windows Platform, all spending just a few minutes of time.

The Windows Template Studio is a VS2017 extension that accelerates the creation of new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps by presenting a developer friendly wizard like interface to bring together the pages, frameworks and features that you want to use in your app.

The four steps to quickly scaffold a new UWP app are:

  1. Project Type: Select between standard layouts and predefined controls. Some common types are: blank, navigation pane and pivot and tabs.
  2. Framework selection: Select the structure of your UWP app with in-house and third-party support. You can select from Code behind, MVVM Basic or the very popular MVVM Light.
  3. App pages: Select which pages that make sense for the app, that you are trying to create. Most common pages such as Master/Detail, Settings and Web view are ready for use.
  4. App features: Application Lifecycle features such as Suspend and Resume as well as Background Work (Azure hub notifications) and User Interaction are handled behind the scenes.

How to get started

In order to make use of Windows Template Studio, follow the steps below to create your own app in three simple steps:

  1. Download Visual Studio 2017 on Windows 10 PC and select Universal Windows Platform development under Workloads.
  2. Get Visual Studio Extension for Windows Template Studio by downloading the VSIX from the Visual Studio Gallery.
  3. Open Visual Studio 2017 and select File→ New Project→ C# → Windows Universal and you should see the new template that was added in step 2 above.

Additionally, Microsoft is completely open-sourcing Windows Template Studio and is available now on GitHub, where you can contribute to the project or report issues to the team.

Source