Windows App Developer Links - 2012-05-29

posted on 28 May 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Preparing for the Windows 8 Opportunity (Jon Box)

    • "Yes, there's a new O/S coming from Microsoft. It's more different than any Windows before. Windows is truly reimagined. It's also a big opportunity for our customers and our partners, across the whole ecosystem. As my DPE friends and I work with partners to prepare for the coming wave of goodness, I want to point out some resources that I share on a daily basis..."

  • Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App -- Part 1 Starting Up With New Semantic Tags (Bruce Kyle)

    • "I have an idea for an app. I want my app to be able to run in the Web on multiple browsers. But I also want to be able to turn my code into an app that runs on Windows 8, Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android. My answer seems to be HTML5. So what is this HTML5 all about? In this series of posts, I'll describe what you need to know to build a line of business application. I'll provide code samples, and I'll post my example code so you can have a starting point with each features."

  • Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App - Part 2 Setting Up Your Development Environment (Bruce Kyle)

    • "In Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App -- Part 1 Starting Up With New Semantic Tags, I got a quick view of some of the new HTML5 tags. But if I want to go further, I need a good solid development environment. I can use NotePad. I can use whatever editor I need. But what are the set of technologies? And what tools will help me develop my app? And where can I get the cool stuff that Microsoft offers for little or no charge, like Visual Studio? And what about jQuery, Modernizr, CSS, and Canvas?"

  • Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App - Part 3 Adding Some Style (Bruce Kyle)

    • "In Part 1, I just got some HTML code written as a skeleton to get me started. In Part 2, I wanted to build out my development environment so I got a trial copy of Visual Studio 11, and Expression. First of all, I want to place place the text and stylize. I want to build out the blocks and place them on the screen. And I'll add Modernizr and those features later. The goal is not to teach you CSS, but to show off some of the possibilities of what you can do to get started."

  • Your first DirectX 11 Metro application using SharpDX (Rodrigo Díaz)

    • "If you want to target Metro apps with DirectX, the only initial option is to use C++/CX, which in my humble opinion is a total overkill and a huge step back. Sealed classes, no member functions for structures... this is the 21st century, please let me use a modern programming language and not one that has been patched through 30 years of existence. Well, now you can do this, thanks to the SharpDX project. It's a series of wrappers that let you access the DirectX libraries from your C# code, and since XNA looks like a dead end, it's what I'll be writing about from now on."

  • Windows 8 Game Development resources (Glen Gordon )

    • "Earlier this week, for the Atlanta chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) I gave an introductory talk on building Metro style games for Windows 8. It was great to see so many folks excited about building games for Windows 8, out of the 50 people who attended, almost all are going to explore doing so. Here is a collection of resources that I mentioned that will get you started..."

  • Dynamic backgrounds (Jose Fajardo)

    • "Don't be afraid to create crazy backgrounds for your managed metro apps. This is a quick post on how to do just that using some of the techniques I've been posting about. For this post ill stay simple BUT the next post I promise to go crazy with the colors, textures, geometries and especially the animations..."

  • Loading WinRT Types via Reflection in Windows 8 (Peter Torr)

    • "Hopefully this will get added to the documentation eventually, but recently I was playing around with some reflection code in Windows 8 Consumer Preview and a few web searches for the "obvious" keywords didn't yield any results, so I thought I'd post this up in case anyone else falls into the same boat. It's not rocket science to figure out, but maybe this will help someone anyway. Say you want to create a Windows.Globalization.Language object via reflection and get its DisplayName. You can use the following..."

  • Controlling caching of BitMapImage under WinRT (Ian Walker)

    • "By default Bitmap Images are cached by WinRT with no intervention required by the developer. Often times this is a good thing but there are some occasions where this is undesirable. Although there doesn't appear to be any obvious control in the API reference I have found that adding a dummy querystring to the BitMapImage source filename reference does the trick and also can offer precise control over the length of caching required (if any)..."

  • Building Metro style apps with XAML and C++ (Channel 9)

    • "With the introduction of Metro style apps for C++ developers, Microsoft now brings the XAML UI platform to native code! I will take you through a lap around creating a Metro style app in XAML and C++. I'll introduce the fundamentals of the XAML platform in WinRT and how C++ developers can easily write applications with a consistent, touch-friendly UI framework. I'll walk through the developer experience in Visual Studio for creating these apps, noting how (and why) code is structured in the project system. I will also demonstrate some of the powerful benefits of XAML in databinding and custom control development. Finally, I will introduce the developer tools that enable you to design XAML in a graphical way within Visual Studio as well as Blend."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Show ratings with stars in WinRT XAML (Igor Ralic)

    • "When you try to build an app that displays ratings of some kind, it's often interesting to show them using stars "notation". Unfortunately, there is no native rating control to be used with WinRT and XAML, but on the bright side there are many open source projects available for Silverlight and WPF that can be ported relatively easy. I did that for one of my projects and I'll show you about it more in this blog article..."