Windows Template Studio

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code, Michael Crump and Clint RutkaS from Microsoft discuss their project Windows Template Studio, a new getting started experience for Universal Windows Platform. 01:44 EC: This week there's a lot of amazing things being announced at Build. You guys are working on something that is coming out of this Build week. Why don't you give us a little introduction to the Windows Template Studio that you guys are working on? 02:05 CR: Okay, so Windows Template Studio is a... Helps out your File New experience. With UWP development, the templates basically that you have access to is a blank application. And for most developers, that could be a bit overwhelming and it helps... To build up a scaffolding for where you need to be can take multiple hours to just to get it functional when you're adding in, let's say six pages of background task, wanting live tiles. Let's say you wanna add in some, use the MVVM Light framework and add in suspend and resume. To do all that and to test it and validate, it takes multiple hours. We know this 'cause we actually asked one of our documentation experts to build an app and record it from start to finish. It took him about three hours. And we built out a dynamic generation tool that can do it in about 20 seconds with full clicking from start to finish. 03:13 MC: And I was just gonna add on to that last... That little piece is that I think a lot of the times that people get caught up in, "Okay, if I want to add X, Y and Z feature, I have to spend a ton of times in the documentation. I have to... " The typical developer may go and decide, "Oh, I'm gonna top this in and Bing or Google it. And it will hit me over to Stack Overflow, and I want to try to maybe find something that looks similar and then copy and paste. Or go try it, F5, and then go back to maybe some documentation." This is definitely designed to get you to that F5 experience, with the pages, frameworks and features that you need. 03:56 CR: And that's out of the gate. And the other great thing is, is that we call this Windows Template Studio. When your app is fully generated, you can F5 it. But all we do is build up the framework. We don't do everything for you because we can't assume what you, as a developer, want to do. So we have little to-dos. Like if you add in a background task. We have zero clue what type of background task trigger you want, or what that background task should actually functionally do. So, we add in a to-do that puts you exactly where that line of code that you need to start putting in stuff, and tell you this is where you need to do this. Or if you use a map control, we tell you exactly where to get the Bing map API key, and what variable you need to put that into. Out of the gate you can get quickly up and running to build out your app to do the cool stuff rather than the mundane stuff like building out the scaffolding. 04:55 EC: Let's try to visualize this for the folks listening. We're talking about Windows universal applications right now, so we're talking about the stuff that's in the Windows store, and you're running on your Windows desktop, HoloLens and things like that, right? So the UWP platform. And this is to augment the File New project experience where right now you get a blank application but it doesn't really do a whole lot. So you're saying it takes about three hours to build up something that's even moderately useful as a starter application. And in ASP.NET MVC, we have something that starts up. And we have things like Bootstrap installed, and some of the JavaScript libraries that we need. This Windows template studio gives us that experience, but there's a little bit more to it, right? Read more at http://developer.telerik.com/topics/net/announcing-windows-template-studio/