Xamarin Community Toolkit - Tutorial Series

From this post, we are going to see about Xamarin Community Toolkit, followed by the features of this Xamarin Community Toolkit as a series of tutorials.

Xamarin Community Toolkit

The Xamarin Community Toolkit is a collection of reusable elements for mobile development with Xamarin.Forms, including animations, behaviors, converters, effects, and helpers. It simplifies and demonstrates common developer tasks when building iOS, Android, macOS, WPF and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps using Xamarin.Forms. 

The Xamarin Community Toolkit is available as a Visual Studio NuGet package for new or existing Xamarin.Forms projects. This includes the beloved C# UI Extensions, MediaElement, and Expander controls. There is much more to the toolkit though as the community has been contributing tons of great new controls and helpers. You can also preview the capabilities of the toolkit by running the sample app available in the Xamarin Community Toolkit repo.

Features of Xamarin Community Toolkit

This toolkit’s offers many of those behaviors, converters, and effects that you keep copying from one project to another and aggregate all of these into a single package so it will become your one-stop library that has it all. The Toolkit will also be a place where you can find brand new controls. Some of them come from PRs to Xamarin.Forms that couldn’t be included in the main package, some our controls maintainers donating their controls, and some are just brand-new things!

1. Behaviors
   • Animations
   • Validators
   • EventloCommand
   • ImpliedOrderGrid
   • Masked (input)
   • UserStoppedTyping
2. Converters
   • ByteArrayTolmageSource
   • ItemSelectedEventArgs
   • MultiConverterParameter
   • NotEqual
   • TextCase
3. Effects
   • SafeArea
4. Extensions
   • ImageResource
   • Translate
   • ValueConverter
5. Helpers
   • Localization
   • Subscription
   • WeakEvent
6. ObjectModel
   • AsyncCommand
   • ObservableRangeCollection
7. Views
   • CameraView
   • Expander
   • SideMenuView
   • AvatarView
   • RangeSlider

Setup Xamarin Community Toolkit

• The toolkit is available as a NuGet package that can be added to any existing or new project using Visual Studio. Open an existing project, or create a new project using the Blank Forms App template.
• In the Solution Explorer panel, right click on your project name and select Manage NuGet Packages. Search for Xamarin.CommunityToolkit, and choose the desired NuGet Package from the list.
  
• To add the namespace to the toolkit, In your C# page, add

   using Xamarin.CommunityToolkit;

  In your XAML page, add the namespace attribute:

   xmlns:xct="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2020/toolkit"

We will see the upcoming tutorials on Xamarin Community Toolkit