Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-10

posted on 10 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

I seem to be collecting a fair amount of Windows 8 & Metro App development links so it might be beneficial to both record and share them. With that in mind, here is my first installment of Interesting Windows 8 Links.

Windows 8

  • Pinned Sites in Windows 8 (IEBlog)

    • "We’ve written about Internet Explorer 10’s Metro style browsing experience on Windows 8. This post describes in detail IE10’s pinned sites and their availability on the Windows 8 Start screen—complete with site-centric visuals and badge notifications to let you know there is new content. We’ll also walk through the Web developer details to support pinned sites."

Metro App Development

  • .NET and Metro: The Windows Runtime and the CLR on Windows 8 (Jeremy Likness)

    • "After spending many months digging into the Windows Runtime (WinRT), Metro style or “tailored” applications, and exploring how they related to the .NET Framework, I’ve come to the conclusion that the two work very closely together and in fact are engineered to integrate. ... The .NET Framework 4.5 is very much “Metro-aware” while the Windows Runtime knows how to shake hands with the CLR. The purpose of this post is to elaborate on this a bit more than what I covered in my Portable Class Library series."

  • How to improve performance in your Metro style app (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

    • "Nobody likes slow or unresponsive apps. Users expect that apps respond immediately to touch, taps, clicks, gestures and key-presses. Users expect that animations are smooth, that they can play, pause and restart their music and videos quickly, and that they never have to wait for the app to catch up with them. This is the first in a series of posts on how to make your apps "fast and fluid.""

  • Quick Tip: Show WinRT XAML Binding Errors (Shawn Wildermuth)

    • "I saw a tip by Tim Heuer on a StackOverflow question about how to show binding errors in the Output window of managed WinRT (e.g. Metro-style) XAML projects. Since I had a hard time finding it, I thought I'd drop a quick image to help you find it."

  • Installing enterprise metro apps without using Microsoft Store (Microsoft UK Faculty Connection)

    • "Over the past few days I have had a few questions re how does a University go about installing Enterprise apps onto Windows 8 machines without having to setup Microsoft LiveIDs on each of the machines."

  • How to Add and Remove Apps (TechNet)

    • "You can add line-of-business (LOB) Metro style apps to a Windows® image by using Windows PowerShell® or the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) platform. LOB applications do not have to be certified or installed through the Windows Store, but they must be signed with a certificate that is chained to a trusted root certificate. To install Metro style apps that are not part of your business line, you must use the Windows Store."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • XAML Dialect Comparer Tool (Markus Egger)

    • "This tool allows for comparison of different XAML dialects and utilized framework namespaces. Want to know if your Silverlight project will translate well to Windows 8 Metro? And whether your Metro assets can be reused in your Windows Phone app? And how about that WPF app?"

  • Image Processing in Metro (Greg Ross)

    • "I finally got around to playing with the Windows 8 developer preview and Metro apps. After tinkering around with the new Start Menu and apps, I decided to try a simple image display and processing Metro app."