Windows App Developer Links - 2012-05-17

posted on 16 May 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 11

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK (Visual Studio Gallery)

    • "By using the Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK, you can create tool windows, menu commands, editor extensions, isolated shell projects, and other extensions for Visual Studio. The SDK also helps you test and debug your extensions in an experimental instance of Visual Studio so that your primary development environment is not changed unexpectedly. After you install the SDK, you can use the shortcuts on the Start menu to find the online documentation, samples, and other developer resources."

Metro App Development

  • Being productive when your app is offscreen (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

    • "In the Managing app lifecycle post, Adam Barrus described the new app lifecycle introduced in Windows 8. The most common question we hear is "what if my app has to do something important when it is not on screen, for example, download a file or email or play music"? In this two part series, I'll tell you about the different types of activities that an app can do when it's in the background and show some code examples to that support these scenarios."

  • What Metro style app packages are installed? (Mike Ormond)

    • "There comes a time when you'll want to see a list of all the Metro style app packages installed on your Windows 8 machine. Occasionally you may need to do this in order to fix a registration issue - I've seen this happen occasionally in Consumer Preview - manually removing the app package can resolve it. In addition, there's a limit to the number of side-loaded apps you can have installed on the Consumer Preview. If you exceed the limit you wont be able to renew your developer licence. I hit this issue at one of our events last week and seeing a complete list of all the installed app packages was very useful."

  • Learning XAudio2 (Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK)

    • "With the inclusion of XAudio2 in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, there's been renewed interest in learning how to use this API. The documentation on MSDN is of course a great place to start, and be sure to read through the entire Programmer's Guide as there's lots of great information throughout. You should also start by watching the BUILD 2011 presentation on audio. There are also a number of presentations from past Gamefest events that cover audio and XAudio2. While these talks are focused on the older versions, XAudio 2.8 is essentially the same design and API with a few specific differences so this information is all very relevant."

  • Get coordinates from directmath vectors in Windows 8 and C++ (Secret Microsoft Communications)

    • "Vectors operations are similar to Matrix operations, but there is usually a need for faster calculations. On one of my jobs in the 1980s we had to create a digital system that could do calculations very rapidly and with the power supply had to be lighter and smaller then a similar electrical analog computer that used differential voltages. It was a struggle, literally, the differential analog based calculations were more accurate and could take a mechanical beating, especially if an electro-magnetic pulse went off near by, although I never understood why since the EMP would generate weird voltages. Eventually we were able to add more features and got a buy off of the design. But for most of the history of humans, there were no digital computers, and there a lot of natural analog computers, there are no natural digital computers."

  • Metro on Windows 8 - Illegal characters in path (Nick Berardi)

    • "As I was developing my first Metro App today I came upon this weird error. ... Not knowing what to do, because the error is vague and cryptic. I decided to throw a hail mary pass and remove the application I was developing from the start menu. And lo and behold this was the problem. I know this is still a beta framework and everything, but can the Windows team please throw us a bone and put in exceptions that actually mean something."

Other

  • Reminder: Programming Windows, Sixth Edition available for preorder

    • Just reminding everyone that today, May 17th, is the first day that you can preorder "Programming Windows, Sixth Edition" by Charles Petzold (eBook) at the discounted price of $10 which includes preview copies for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Release Preview in addition to the final eBook. This discounted price will only be available for two weeks.