Over the 2.5 years I've spent making UWP apps, here are the tools I use every day to design and code them.

Design

Pen and paper

When I come up with an idea, I write it down as soon as possible so I don't forget it. Then I start doing rough sketches of what the app screens would look like. I always start with the small screen sizes first. (I'll discuss why in another article).

Figma

After drawing out app screens on pen and paper, I start creating the screens in full detail on Figma. I personally love it because I can work on my design projects from anywhere since Figma is cloud-based!

Character Map UWP

While designing the app in Figma, there are almost always Windows 10 specific icons that I need to use. Because of this, I search for the icons I need using Character Map UWP then copy them into Figma. Note: When I mean search, I mean literally search for the icon by its name. It's amazing!

Inkscape

Usually, after I've finished designing the app, I create use Inkscape to create the app logo and store assets like the hero wallpaper, screenshots and poster art.

Code

Visual Studio 2019

It's pretty much the IDE that does it all. This is the preferred program used to create UWP apps. Code completion, debugging and now pair programming are the really awesome features that Visual Studio does well! By the way, the community edition is free!

Github

For every project I make, I always create repositories here. I mainly use this to have backups when things go wrong and to transfer my progress to other devices.

Github Gist

For lines of code that I write a lot, I save them as snippets on here. I wish it was more visible and more love was given to it.

Notifications Visualiser

This app makes the process of creating notifications (Both Toast and Live Tile Notifications) super easy, allowing you to test the notifications with templates and allowing you to export the code to produce the notification when you are done! Saves so much time.

If you have any more suggestions, please feel free to reply below. Thank you!