Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-12

posted on 11 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Internet Explorer 10

Visual Studio 2012

  • A World of Samples at your Fingertips (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "Samples are the primary way that we as developers learn to develop applications for a new platform. We use samples as a starting point to learn about new APIs, we reference them when we hit bugs in our own code and need a comparison, and we share them for others to learn from our discoveries. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a sample is worth thousand pages of documentation. With Visual Studio 2012 we set out to give developers easy access to find and use samples, especially when building applications for Windows 8..."

  • Announcing the LightSwitch HTML Client! (Visual Studio LightSwitch Team Blog)

    • "We are thrilled to announce our upcoming support for building cross-browser, mobile web clients with Visual Studio LightSwitch! The new HTML5 and JavaScript-based client is an important companion to our Silverlight-based desktop client that addresses the increasing need to build touch-oriented business applications that run well on modern mobile devices..."

Metro App Development

  • Activating Windows 8 contracts in your app (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "One topic that we've demonstrated quite a bit is how apps on a Windows 8 PC can communicate with other apps and web services. At the start of Windows 8 we chose an approach where apps can be the source or destination for data you want to share—sort of like a clipboard, but with a richer interaction model and clearer semantics. When an app implements a contract, Windows 8 can provide glue between that app and any other apps on the system, and the system itself. ... This innovative approach allows Windows 8 to work with any app/service pair rather than "hardcoding" a single level of support for a given app. And all of this is supported, if you choose, by your Microsoft account, which you can connect to different services, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and more. Over the course of this week, we'll do a series of posts on the new Microsoft apps, where sharing, connecting, and integration with Windows 8 are key topics..."

  • Windows 8 Ads in Apps - Release Preview SDK Available (Windows Advertising)

    • "We are announcing the availability of the Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 Release Preview. This SDK release gives app developers the opportunity to further experiment with the advertising capabilities in Windows 8 applications and provide feedback on the experiences. Windows 8 presents new opportunities for both developers and advertisers. Developers can use advertising to monetize their applications while presenting a rich, engaging and immersive advertising experience to their users. Advertisers can utilize advertising within apps to deepen their engagement with their customers. We will provide a detailed overview of the new advertising experiences in the coming months..."

  • Technology Soup: Fun with Windows 8 Metro apps, WinRT, ESE, C++/CX, .NET and JavaScript (Mike Taulty)

    • "Ok, I just wanted to see how many technologies I could get into the title of a blog post ;-) This one really falls into the category of ‘just for fun'. I wanted to experiment with writing a custom WinRT component in C++/CX and then try using it from .NET and JavaScript Metro style apps as I haven't really had a chance to try out anything much in C++/CX just yet although I do have an old (and rusting) background in C++ and I've also written some C++/CLI in my time and I believe there's commonalities between those two things even though they serve very different purposes (i.e. CX == native code, CLI == managed code)..."

  • Compressing Data in Windows 8 Metro Applications (Jeremy Likness)

    • "Storing large amounts of data can take up a large amount of disk space. Data compression encodes information in a way that reduces its overall size. There are two general types of compression. Lossy compression may not preserve all of the original information and is often used in image, video, and audio compression. Lossless compression preserves the full fidelity of the original data set. The Windows 8 runtime exposes the Compressor and Decompressor classes for compression. The Compression project provides an active example of compressing and decompressing a data stream..."

  • Getting Windows 8 Applications into the Windows Store (Bruno Terkaly)

    • "Developers will need to get their applications certified before being able to get into the Windows Store. Windows 8 applications rely on Metro design guidelines. This post will provide some guidelines."

  • 5 things you should know about developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5 (Martin Beeby)

    • "Now that the Windows 8 release preview is out, a lot of developers are beginning to experiment with what they can do with Windows 8. Unsurprisingly the focus for many is on Metro-style apps that can run across everything from desktop to slate. There are a number of ways to develop these apps but HTML5 is a good place to start if your background is Web Development. While Metro offers fantastic flexibility, it does require that we get our heads around some new concepts. So for this post I thought I'd cover some of the areas I talk about at events and point you towards some useful resources to get you started. I've selected 5 things that I think you should start exploring..."

  • Building WinRT Components with C++/CX (Harry Pierson)

    • "I don't get out to talk to customers like I used to in previous jobs. But a few weeks ago, I got a chance to do a session at Channel 9's Developing Windows 8 Metro style apps with C++ Windows Camp. There were some great talks at the event on XAML with C++, C++ for Metro Style Games and using DirectX and XAML together. My talk was on building Windows Runtime Components in C++. ... I haven't had time, but I plan to blog the demo step-by-step like I did for my //build demo. In the meantime, check out the talk..."

  • Stronger User Access Control (UAC) Minimum in Windows 8 (Brian Noyes)

    • "I recently stumbled over a new feature in Windows 8 that some people, especially developers may want to be aware of. In Windows 7 if you were logged in with a user account associated with the Administrators group, and you turned the User Access Control (UAC) slider down to its minimum level, you were basically running all apps as full admin permission. Once I started developing in Windows 8, I tried setting things up the same way but was a little baffled when some things started prompting me for running as admin or failing for permissions reasons. For example, launching a particular solution I was working on in Visual Studio 2010 for debugging resulted in this..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Designing Windows 8 Applications with C# and XAML (Jeremy Likness)

    • "This project hosts the source code used in the example projects for the book, Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML. You can follow the progress of the book online at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Designing-Windows-8-Metro-Applications-with-C-and-XAML/114194758709235"

Other

  • Building and Deploying Windows Azure Web Sites using Git and GitHub for Windows (Shiju Varghese)

    • "Microsoft Windows Azure team has released a new version of Windows Azure which is providing many excellent features. The new Windows Azure provides Web Sites which allows you to deploy up to 10 web sites for free in a multitenant shared environment and you can easily upgrade this web site to a private, dedicated virtual server when the traffic is grows. The Meet Windows Azure Fact Sheet provides the following information about a Windows Azure Web Site..."