Toolkit Labs

🧪 Let's Experiment Together! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

Community Toolkit Labs is a place for rapidly prototyping ideas and gathering community feedback. It is an incubation space where the developer community can come together to work on new ideas before thinking about final quality gates and ship cycles. Developers can focus on the scenarios and usage of their features before finalizing docs, samples, and tests required to ship a complete idea within the Toolkit.

🔬 Current Experiments

Below is a list of the current repositories we have for current experiments. Check out each one for more details.

• Windows Community Toolkit Labs is the new home for creating all new components and features for the Windows Community Toolkit.
• Eye Gaze Controls aim to make applications more accessible to eye gaze with gaze-first designed controls.
• Intelligent APIs aim to make machine learning (ML) tasks easier for UWP developers to leverage in their applications without needing ML expertise or creating a new model.

🚧 Labs NuGet Feed

We have a dedicated NuGet feed for Toolkit Labs in our public DevOps package feed. You can find out more about using these types of feeds on the Preview Packages page.

❓ Why Labs?

As the Community Toolkit has grown, we've raised the bar on the quality of our code and the process we use for vetting new features being introduced. While this helps our community know they're getting quality tested items in each of our releases; it can slow down the pace that we can innovate at.

Innovation has been the life of the Community Toolkit, without it we wouldn't be here! Rapidly prototyping ideas, gathering community feedback, and shipping things folks need has been instrumental to how the Toolkit works. For this reason, we've introduced Community Toolkit Labs.

Labs are places where we can incubate and work on new features in a safe space outside our normal code base and ship cycles. It'll be easier to get started working on code and collaborating with others before having to worry about the docs, samples, and tests required to ship a full fleshed-out idea and feature within the Toolkit. Especially when you're just starting with a prototype!

Labs are setup with a lower barrier to entry, so a developer can get initial feedback, work more on an idea with others, and gather feedback from a broader set of developers.

We plan to have a central repository for each Toolkit's technology for smaller features and controls to be proposed, incubate, and worked in with the community. The first of these is the new Windows Community Toolkit Labs.