Introducing the WCT

The WCT was created by Microsoft as an open source collection of controls and other helpers, tools, and services for Windows developers. It is primarily used by UWP and WinUI developers but also adds value for WinForms and WPF developers. In fact, developers can use the toolkit's XAML Islands controls to embed WinUI controls into existing WinForms and WPF applications. The toolkit is available to developers as a set of NuGet packages. There are over a dozen toolkit packages available on NuGet that can be installed independently, depending on the needs of your project. We will explore some of these packages throughout this chapter. Let's start by discussing the history of the WCT.

The toolkit was open sourced from the very beginning, is available on GitHub (https://github.com/windows-toolkit/WindowsCommunityToolkit), and is open to community contributions. The documentation is available on Microsoft Docs at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/communitytoolkit...