Announcing: UWP Essentials

I want to help make it easier to get started with UWP development.

In terms of the tools available to help UWP developers, there are two challenges.

1. Knowing what tools are available to help with development.
2. Getting everything available installed.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 introduced new functionality to help with this. It's called Extension Packs and is a way to create an extension that bundles (or packs) together a number of other extensions.

So I made one for UWP developer tools.

Consider it a one-stop shop for setting up your machine for UWP development. You can be new to UWP development or just want an easy way to make sure all the useful tools are installed.

The first version contains these extensions:

• Windows Template Studio
• Multilingual App Toolkit
• XAML Styler
• Console App (Universal) Project Templates
• CommandLine-Activated Windows App (Templates)
• Multi-Instance App Project Templates 

I've published this myself, even though I'm not responsible for all the packages, but I'd love for this to be a community-supported resource and so I'm keen to hear if you have suggestions for other extensions that should be included as well.

Even if you don't want to install all the included extensions you can unselect what you don't want when you install.

Select what you want to include as part of the installer process 

You'll need to be using Visual Studio in version 15.8 or above for this to work.

Go get it from within VS or from the marketplace.

If you have suggestions for other tools that should be included raise an issue on GitHub.