Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-05

posted on 04 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

Internet Explorer 10

  • Legacy DX Filters Removed from IE10 Release Preview (IEBlog)

    • "Internet Explorer's commitment to achieving the goal of consistent "same markup, same results" across browsers is evidenced, in part, by IE9's and IE10's addition of CSS3 features that enable Web sites to move to standards-based features for their graphical effects. Earlier we wrote that Internet Explorer's legacy visual filters and transitions, first introduced in IE4, are not supported in IE10's Standards and Quirks modes and noted their inferior performance compared to their standards-based replacements. Based on further analysis of these filters' performance and their very low usage on the public Web, Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 Release Preview removes them from all document modes for all sites in the Internet zone. The features remain available in IE10's document modes 5, 7, 8, and 9 for sites in the Local Intranet and Trusted Sizes zones."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Setup Improvements for Visual Studio (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "Setup is the first experience most of us have of Visual Studio, and in the Visual Studio 2012 we've made significant investments in improving your experience. Many of you have already told us you like our new user interface (thank you!). We have also been investing in ratcheting up the speed at which we lay bits down, improving the experience for non-English installations, and honing the experience you use to select which components to install..."

Metro App Development

  • MEF and TPL Dataflow NuGet Packages for .NET Framework 4.5 RC (BCL Team Blog)

    • "If you've installed the .NET Framework 4.5 RC, you may have noticed some differences between this prerelease and the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta. One of the changes we made was to move two libraries to an independent distribution model via NuGet. Many of you sent us feedback about the frustration of waiting for a full product cycle to get small changes. By changing the distribution model, we are taking our first steps toward meeting this challenge. ... The packages we are releasing on NuGet - TPL Dataflow and MEF for Windows Metro style apps - were included in the base installation of the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta, but are now available as NuGet packages. These packages are fully supported, first-class members of the BCL and offer additional functionality over their .NET Framework 4.5 Beta versions."

  • Windows 8 Metro: Asynchrony made easy (Andrea Boschin)

    • "After the birth of Silverlight the developers have had to deal with asynchronous programming much more than before. The responsiveness of the user interface has always been an important matter and asynchronous programming has been the right response also before than Silverlight, in Windows Forms and WPF. But for the first time, Silverlight made a strict request by the framework to run a lot of tasks asynchronous. Due to architectural choices, all the calls to the network API had to be made in an async way, and this caused a number of headaches to developers that for the very first time couldn't forget about asynchronicity paying the price of a bad user experience. In metro-style applications, the concept of "make it asynchronous" is exploded to the extreme consequences..."

  • Designing Metro style: Being the Best on Windows 8 (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "The other day, I published a post that contended that every developer has at least some responsibility for the design of the apps they're working on, particularly if they don't have the luxury of working with full-time designer on their project. The post also looked at some of the history of the Metro design language, and how the work that Microsoft is doing with Metro style apps in Windows 8, and the guidance we provide, can help developers build great apps. ... Without a "best at" statement, the temptation may be strong to throw in every feature you can think of in an effort to outdo your competitors in a contest of who can come up with the longest bulleted list of features. This is not a recipe for success in a Windows 8 Metro style app. Why? Because it's virtually impossible for an app to be "best at" everything, so being selective about the features you focus on is more likely to lead you to success."

  • W8WIL #2: Declaratively Specifying an ItemTemplate in a Fragment (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "I've been playing quite a bit over the last few days with the new Windows 8 Release Preview, as part of a special team project I'm working on with some of my fellow DEs. One of the areas I was working on is doing some simple databinding using a ListView control in a JavaScript Metro style app based on the Navigation App template. In this second installment of my Windows 8, What I've Learned series, I'll give you a tip that may help save you some pain and troubleshooting time when declaratively associating an ItemTemplate for a ListView control inside a page fragment. I was able to very easily create an array with a couple of objects, each with a couple of properties, and then bind those to the ListView by passing the array to the constructor of the WinJS.Binding.List object, which gave me a List object with a dataSource property that I could assign to the ListView's itemDataSource property in the ready() function of home.js, like so..."

  • Binding to a ConverterParameter in Windows 8 Metro (Diederik Krols)

    • "This article describes how to simulate databinding to a ConverterParameter in a Windows 8 Metro XAML app. Let's say we have a TextBlock that displays a value from the ViewModel, and a Converter that takes this value together with some Range object as parameter. The converter should return a Brush -green or red- that indicates wether or not the value is within the range. The converter is used for providing the foreground color of the textblock. The following intuitive code would represent this behavior..."

  • Upgrade Metro App From Beta To RC (Shai Raiten)

    • "In my previous post Convert VS 11 Beta Metro Projects To VS 2012 RC I talked about upgrading the Project file from Beta to RC, in this post I'll try to talk about all changes made from Beta to RC. I don't know all the breaking changes in JavaScript and C# but I collect all the breaking changes from the application and games I develop and I'll show them here..."

  • Migrating a Windows 8 Metro Style App from Consumer Preview to Release Preview (Dave Isbitski)

    • "I've been working on a Windows 8 Metro Style App written, using JavaScript, I call Space Cadet. All of the code samples I have previously posted were built on the Consumer Preview (CP) bits so I thought I would attempt at converting the app to the just announced Release Preview (RP). I had to do a couple of things to get my app up and running on RP from the CP bits. I will break it down into the following five categories..."

  • WinRT Consumer Preview vs WinRT Release Preview (First Floor Software)

    • "Comparing WinRT Consumer Preview (Build 8250) to WinRT Release Preview (Build 8400)." This page lists all of the API changes between the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the Windows 8 Release Preview.

Books

  • Free ebook: Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (First Preview) (Microsoft Press)

    • "Hello! To help celebrate the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate, we're happy to release a preview edition of Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, by Kraig Brockschmidt (who, some of you might remember, many years ago worked with us on a couple editions of Inside OLE)..."