Microsoft released version 8.2 of the Windows Community Toolkit in April 2025. The new release has updated dependencies, .NET 9 support for UWP applications and Native AOT compilation.
The Windows Community Toolkit (WCT) is a collection of controls and libraries that help Windows developers by providing additional features that the underlying platform doesn’t yet offer. Historically, the features provided by the toolkit were gradually incorporated into the Windows development platform itself.
The Windows Community Toolkit is not to be confused with the .NET Community Toolkit (NCT), which contains the common features of WCT that aren’t tied to any underlying UI platform.
There are no major new features in version 8.2. The most important ones are the updated dependencies and target framework monikers (TFM) and Native AOT (ahead of time) compilation support.
The dependencies of the toolkit are now updated to the latest versions: Windows App SDK 1.6 (was 1.5 previously) and Uno Platform 5.5 (was 5.2 in the previous release). The minimum Windows target framework moniker is downgraded to 19041 (it was 22621 in version 8.1 of WCT). The higher TFM caused bugs with NuGet packages for some users, and it took some time for the team to patch the correct dependency and downgrade the whole toolkit dependency.
A small namespace update for XAML behaviours now uses Microsoft.Xaml.Interactivity instead of Microsoft.Xaml.Interactions.Core namespace. By referencing v3 of the behaviour library, both older and newer underlying Windows platforms are abstracted correctly.
Native AOT compilation is now supported for all platforms. When compiled ahead of time, the performance of the applications is better as they already contain the platform-specific executable instead of .NET intermediate language assemblies. There are still a couple of issues with the Native AOT support and they are being worked on.
For developers still using UWP framework for their Windows applications, the new toolkit introduces .NET 9 support via Visual Studio update. It doesn’t include any improvements of UWP framework, just the ability to target .NET 9 from UWP apps.
Minor fixes in version 8.2 include a DispatchedQueueTimer.Debounce extension method improvement for rate-limiting events, as well as support for the AcrylicBrush object (a semi-transparent paint material for UI)
Microsoft recommends developers check and contribute to the Windows Community Toolkit Labs, a repository for pre-release and experimental features that aren’t stable enough for the main WCT repository. For example, there is an automatic DependencyProperty code generator that is controlled by attributes and uses partial properties that are part of C# 13 specification.
Version 8.2.250402 was released on April 2nd 2025, eight months after version 8.1. The source code for the toolkit is available on GitHub.
