Windows App Developer Links - 2012-05-28

posted on 27 May 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 11

  • Visual Studio 11 Performance: Improvements in Typing and Editing Responsiveness (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "After the beta release, we published several posts on the performance improvements in Visual Studio 11. Since the beta release, we have made a number of additional enhancements, continuing our quest to improve the performance of Visual Studio. The performance work done between beta and the upcoming RC was substantial and covered many aspects of the product including XAML (compiler, loading documents, and the design surface), C++, TLM, Debugging and the list goes on. We plan to blog about a few examples. In this post we'll cover typing responsiveness, and in the next post we'll cover the Toolbox - both of which are areas that have a broad impact on Visual Studio performance. We are excited for you to experience Visual Studio 11's performance improvements in the upcoming RC release and without further ado I would like to introduce Eric Knox from the Visual Studio Pro Team to describe to you the work done to improve typing responsiveness for you."

Metro App Development

  • Porting apps to Windows 8 Metro (Jennifer Marsman)

    • "I've talked to many developers who are excited about Metro app development, but say that the hardest part is coming up with an app idea. Some folks want to walk through converting an existing app to Metro as a learning exercise. There are other folks who have very successful websites or apps that they would like to make available on Windows 8 too. There are a lot of useful resources out there on porting existing applications to Metro apps that will run beautifully on Windows 8..."

  • Part 1: Be pushy with Push Notification in your game: Background (Surf4Fun)

    • "There a lot of urban definitions for the word "push", in software "push" is where a dedicated channel is used for sending data TO a mobile application or game from a web service. If you are a Civil engineer, you might be worried about push of the wind against a building and that is part of your work to make sure that the building doesn't fall down. If you are a mechanical engineer you might be concerned about push which could be incorrectly defined as the amount of force required to cause an object to reach a certain speed with friction subtracted from the total forces. If you an electrical engineer push might be the amount of electrical current which uses the units of amperes. For software developers, on any mobile platform, the use of push notifications is critical to sharing information and status."

  • Be pushy with Push Notification in your game: Application Manifest File (Surf4Fun)

    • "First of all, you will need to enter a Publisher name in the Properties\WMAppManifest.xml file. Change the Publisher from two quotes to the following (carriage returns added by author), for push to work you must type in a publisher name, make something up..."

  • Be pushy with Push Notification in your Game: Class scope variables and HttpNotificationChannel (Surf4Fun)

    • "No matter what I have said in the past, XNA is going to be around for awhile in the Windows Phone 7.5, so let's not leave opportunity on the table, open a New Project Windows Phone Game. If you are using the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, you will need to download the C# Express (2010) package to get everything to work. FYI: This article does end with complete code and the expectation that you need the code to make things understandable, but to keep the article short and to the point, I have not included all of the code..."

  • Metro design principles for developers (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "The Metro design principles for Windows Phone are: Light, Clean, Open, Fast (also referred to as Fierce Reduction by Arturo Toledo), Content not Chrome, Typography, Motion, Authentically Digital. These sound great and look amazing, when they are demonstrated by great UX people, and there is already a million (give or take) blog posts repeating and explaining these principles. But for a developer such as myself with no formal background in graphics and UX, it is quite difficult to translate these principles into an actual app. The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate how I understand these principles in a way, that I hope will be easier to understand for us programmers, by providing examples. A similar approach to explaining Metro on Windows 8 can be found in this case study on Windows Dev Center. This post covers my understanding of 'Fierce Reduction' and 'Content, not Chrome'."

  • Clearing the page cache in Windows 8 Metro apps (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "In Windows 8 Metro apps, the navigation model has been improved over the previous one found on Windows Phone. One difference is that page caching has to be manually enabled for each page, as we explained in part 8 of our Windows Phone to Windows 8 conversion series. And, the page cache is active for both forward and backward navigation, which recently gave me some headaches. The solution is to clear the cache when backing away from the page, and forcing other pages to always be cached."

  • .NET 4.5 WinRT: Get custom attributes from enum value (Matthias Jauernig)

    • "Currently I'm very busy in creating a bigger Windows 8 Metro app for managing private financial data. I'm creating the app with the WinRT/.NET 4.5/C#/XAML programming model of Windows 8 and my first experiences are good. Of course, in the Windows Consumer Preview and VS11 Beta there are some nasty bugs when creating apps, but altogether it's quite nice. Now, .NET developers of Windows 8 Metro apps are facing the problem, that there are many API changes for the WinRT bits of .NET and to cope with those. Yesterday I was facing a nasty problem: I wanted to get a custom attribute, that's defined on an enum value like those..."