Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-11

posted on 10 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Building a rich and extensible media platform (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Windows provides a broad set of technologies for consumers to experience video and audio and for developers to tap into these technologies through rich APIs. This post goes into depth on both of these aspects of the Windows media platform, which has been substantially improved for both desktop and Metro style apps. The landscape for media playback has changed significantly since Windows 7 was released, with an increased focus on streaming, and the desire for content owners to offer playback of their content on a broader array of devices, all while significantly reducing the battery power required for playback. With these new capabilities, which are part of both Windows 8 and Windows RT of course, we worked to provide industry-leading support for consumers and developers. This post was authored by Scott Manchester, group program manager for our Media Platform and Technologies team."

Internet Explorer 10

  • High Quality Visuals for Pinned Sites in Windows 8 (IEBlog)

    • "Pinned Sites in Windows 8 describes how site developers can provide a site icon (favicon) for their sites' pinned site tiles on the Windows 8 Start screen. Many of you shared feedback that you'd like to provide higher-resolution visuals to better depict your site brand on your users' pinned site tiles. In Windows 8 Release Preview, you can to do that: we've added the ability for you to provide a PNG tile image and specify the tile's background color..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "With Visual Studio 2012, we strive to provide the best development experience across all Microsoft platforms. This includes enabling developers to bring to life the richness of Windows desktop applications - whether you are learning to build your first app or whether you've been developing on Microsoft platforms for many years. A few weeks ago, we shared our plans for the Express editions of Visual Studio 2012. As we've worked to deliver the best experience with Visual Studio for our platforms with Windows 8, Windows Phone, and for Web and Windows Azure, we heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level."

Metro App Development

  • The Windows 8 Dev Center: Everything you need to design, build, and sell a Metro style app (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "For Windows 8, we completely reimagined not just the platform, but also how we share app development info with you. Launched 9 months ago, the Windows Dev Center is the one place where you can find all the info and resources you need to get going. Whether you're new to development, seeking inspiration for the next great app, or you're simply stuck and need help, you can find it here. We talked to many developers, and heard a lot about how difficult it could be to find the right info in the MSDN Library. The goal we set for Windows 8 developer content was to try to provide exactly the right content when you needed it, and not have too much info get in your way. To that end we focused on how to do things, instead of on why we built a given feature the way we did..."

  • Listing your desktop app in the Store (Windows Store for developers)

    • "Last week we announced that we've begun accepting desktop apps for listing in the Store, and you'll see these apps in the Store very soon. Currently, we've limited who can submit desktop apps to a small number of partners. As we approach the final version of Windows 8, we'll increase developer access to the Store, so we want to take a few minutes to talk about how we list desktop apps, and what the submission process is like. Carla Di Franco, a Program Manager on the Application and Device Compatibility team, authored this post."

  • Metro: Incrementally load GridView and ListView with ISupportIncrementalLoading (Andrea Boschin)

    • "Developers that usually deal with web applications know that one of the pillar of this kind of applications is the use of paged result sets because moving a huge number of records form the server to the browser is not a good idea. Metro applications suffer the same problem. No matter that metro applications are not strictly web applications, the application architecture imply that the connection to a datasource have to be wrapped by web service call so the need of limiting the usage of the network is a strong requirements. Metro introduces a new interesting method to mange pagine of data..."

  • Windows 8 Metro Style App - Simple WNS Push Notification (Mike Taulty)

    • "I've been asked a couple of times about this so I thought I'd write up a simple way in which you can deliver a push notification to a Windows 8 Metro style app for testing purposes. There are other/better ways involving the Windows Azure Toolkit which would give you a lot more but here's a simple way of getting started. Firstly, if you're not involved in an application that's in the Store then you need to go and visit the following site to register the app..."

  • Handling Click & DoubleClick in Windows 8 Metro JavaScript (Jeff Brand)

    • "I have an app I am working on that requires an element on the page respond to both a click and double click event. In my case, when the user clicks or taps the element, I add a new element to the UI. If the user double clicks the target element, then I want to add a different element. This seems like something that would be a very common occurrence in a touch-centric application. As you probably already know, when you wire up both events to an element, it will process both the click and double click event handlers when you double click the element. To be specific, the click event handler is called and then the double click handler is called. This is certainly not the desired behavior when I wire up both events, and it's disappointing there is not a built-in way to handle things correctly. Fortunately, there is a pretty easy way to handle this so that only one event actually gets acted on."

  • Mind-driven development (Matthias Jauernig)

    • "Ok, after some intensive implementation weeks, I think I should blog some articles about tips'n'tricks when developing Windows 8 Metro apps with WinRT and C#. This first article is about the DataPackage class. You need to get in touch with this class when you want to exchange data from app to app by implementing the Share contract or when you want to implement custom drag&drop functionality in your own app. DataPackage has built-in functionality for exchanging a variety of document formats: Bitmap, Html, Rtf, Text, Uri and StorageItems (files and folders)..."

Other

  • Meet the New Windows Azure (Scott Guthrie)

    • "Today we are releasing a major set of improvements to Windows Azure. Below is a short-summary of just a few of them: New Admin Portal and Command Line Tools, Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Cloud Services and Distributed Caching, New SDKs and Tooling Support, Much, Much More..."

  • Announcing the June 2012 Release of Windows Azure SDK for .NET - Now with Support for Visual Studio 2012 RC (Jason Zander)

    • "I'm excited to announce the release of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET - June 2012, which is available for immediate download here. The SDK provides tools for both Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Studio 2012 RC. Visual Studio 2012 support for the Azure SDK has been a popular request and I'm happy to make this available today in coordination with the June 2012 release of Windows Azure. For more information on today's platform release, I recommend visiting Scott Guthrie's blog for the overall announcement, as well as the videos from today's Meet Windows Azure event..."

  • Windows Azure - No Kidding (Scott Hanselman)

    • "Last year when ScottGu moved over to the Azure group and brought the ASP.NET and IIS teams with him, I'll be frank, I wasn't a fan. I didn't really appreciate Azure or its first iteration. The management portal was obtuse and confusing to use, the service was primarily a PAAS (Platform as a Service) offering and focused on (I thought) confusing terms like Cloud Services and slow deployments. The underlying infrastructure was strong but the developer experience didn't feel "right" to me. I really wasn't feeling it. So I continued to work on ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2012 and the things that were interesting to me. Then, some months ago Scott and some folks showed us the concepts for the new experience and the new management stuff. It clicked. I saw that Scott and his team "gets" it..."