Preview Packages
The Community Toolkit has a variety of ways to test out new features or fixes ahead of their official release. This page describes the various channels available and how to connect them to your development environment.
🚨 It's important to note that with any of these previews, there are APIs, controls, or features which may change or be removed before the final release. They are intended to make it easier for developers to provide feedback on them ahead of time so we can gauge interest or ensure they cover a broad range of scenarios before we ship them. Therefore, it's important to not rely on the preview package too heavily or use within production software without understanding these risks.
As we prepare for an official release, we may release 'official' preview packages to NuGet itself, this allows us to more easily reach a broader audience with a scoped set of updates we want developers to try out before we ship. This allows us to gather feedback and make changes before we 'lock them in' for a release.
To access these previews, you can simply ensure you have the Include prerelease checkbox checked in Visual Studio. This will search and display any preview packages in the version dropdown for CommunityToolkit.Maui NuGet Packages. We typically use the suffix -preview for any of these releases.
To find the package for the latest successful build of a PR you are interested in you can perform the following steps:
- Navigate to the Pull Request that you want to download the build for
- Select the
Checkstab - Expand the
Buildsection on the left hand side - Click on
Build Library (windows-latest)
- Scroll down to and expand
Publish Packages - Click on the
Artefact download URL
- Accept and download the file
To install the package first you have to unzip into a known location and then you can use the 'Package Manager Console' command:
Install-Package C:\{{Folder Location of package}}\CommunityToolkit.Maui.99.0.0-build-XXXX.XXXXX.nupkg
This will run the NuGet package manager and install the PR package you need, but please remember that you also need to install the CommunityToolkit.Maui.Core NuGet from the same downloaded Zip as well as a minimum and the Maps/MediaElement if the PR is related to these parts of the toolkit.
Install-Package C:\{{Folder Location of package}}\CommunityToolkit.Maui.Core.99.0.0-build-XXXX.XXXXX.nupkg
Now you can rebuild your project and test it's working as you hoped before giving feedback to the team if you have any.