With the impending release of Windows 10 I set about updating the Charming Apps libraries to support UWP targets and it soon became painfully clear that things had got too complicated. There was a separate dll for each small area of functionality and various dependencies and 17 NuGet packages to manage (each with multiple platforms).
Version 9 is a reboot of the project and currently consists of just two packages – InTheHand.dll and InTheHand.UI.dll. The first of these is now live on NuGet in preview form and replaces a number of old libraries and adds new stuff! During the MVP Summit I was able to spend the Hackathon rebuilding my development environment and refactoring the entire solution.
https://www.nuget.org/packages/InTheHand/
The API follows the UWP model where possible, making it familiar to Windows developers while extending both backwards to prior Windows versions and also sideways to Xamarin platforms. Also new in Version 9 is a PCL build which allows you to call the shared functionality from a PCL with the functionality itself provided by the platform specific dll in the consuming application. This is useful in scenarios such as Xamarin Forms projects.
For example InTheHand.ApplicationModel.Package provides a mechanism to query the current application package for name/version etc. This is the sort of information you might need for a custom About page or to pass to analytics etc. The InTheHand.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer namespace contains Clipboard and Sharing functionality which now supports Android and iOS too invoking the native experiences in each. The remainder of the InTheHand.ApplicationModel namespaces allow you to kick off a number of tasks such as SMS, Email etc. Other namespaces exist for querying display properties and battery state.
All the code is on GitHub and a very rudimentary version of documentation is in the project Wiki. Most of the documentation in CodePlex still applies too and will be migrated in due course.
https://github.com/inthehand/Charming
Coming in the InTheHand.UI package are InTheHand.UI.Popups (MessageDialog) and InTheHand.UI.ApplicationSettings (currently Windows platforms only) both of which have some neat Windows 10 specific tweaks.
In The Hand Ltd 