Windows Dev News: Community Standup; Edge Summit; Template Studio 1.2; XAML & Visual Layer Interop

Just wanted to update you all on a couple of upcoming events that may be of interest plus a product update launch and some assistance on the APIs for your apps visual look and feel.

These first two items have a time aspect so make sure you take action on those first if they are something you want to participate in.

Community Standup

Kevin Gallo, the head of Microsoft's Developer Platform, will be providing a community update tomorrow, 26 July 2017, on Microsoft's Channel 9 beginning at 9:30 AM Pacific (12:30 PM Eastern).

Among the items he will be discussing are:

-- State of the Windows SDK for the Windows 10 Creators Update

-- .NET Standard 2.0

-- Fluent Design

-- Microsoft Graph with the Acitivty API

Following his comments on the above subjects, Gallo will also do a live Q and A session.

No sign-up or registration is required for this event - just head to https://channel9.msdn.com/ to watch and participate.

Microsoft Edge Summit 2017

On 13 September Microsoft will once again host the Microsoft Edge Web Summit in Seattle and registration is already open.

Seating at this event usually fills up very quickly so jump over and get your registration done now to get your spot. There is no cost for the event but you of course have to get yourself to Seattle and a hotel to stay in.

Note: In the past they have livestreamed some of these sessions but the site does not indicate if that will be the case again this year. I expect many of these sessions will make it onto Channel 9 at some point as well.

The schedule for the day includes 14 technical sessions and a Hallway Track where you can meet with Edge engineers to talk about the browser and your development efforts. Some of the areas included are:

-- Debug Bar

-- Performance Club

-- WebVR Labs

There are a few scholarships to attend as well so check out this tweet from Kyle Pflug on the Edge team for more details.

Windows Template Studio Version 1.2 Release

The latest update to Microsoft's tool to help UWP app developers get started with their own projects includes the following new enhancements:

Improvements to the Wizard:

-- Add new content to existing WTS generated projects in your solution window via right-click
-- Adjusted ordering of templates based on popularity and logical groupings
-- Under the hood, we’ve done a lot of work toward localization and started some accessibility improvements
-- Simplified descriptions
-- Logo adjustment to help at smaller icon sizes

Feature updates:

-- First-time load prompt
-- What’s New prompt

Template improvements:

-- Upgraded references to UWP Community Toolkit 1.5
-- Styling adjustments
-- Template generation post-action improvements

Process improvements:

-- Added in pull request template
-- Added in Issue template

If you already have Windows Template Studio installed it should automatically update from the old version. If you need to download it just head here to get it.

XAML and Visual Layer Interop

The Windows UI team did a two part series about using new elements of the Composition APIs to help you create stand out user interfaces for your own applications.

Part 1 showed how to work with Brushes and Content while Part 2 focused on New Lights and PropertySet Interop.

Each of the blog posts goes through the various usages with code samples to help you understand how they all work together.

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But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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