Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-14

posted on 14 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • The People app: the complete, cloud-powered address book for Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Managing "contacts" has been a bit of a challenge for many, especially as the number of places that contacts can be stored and the number of PCs and devices we use to access those contacts has increased. Storing contacts in the cloud for easy roaming and connectivity is a part of the solution. With Windows 8 and the new People app, we are taking cloud storage a step further by optionally connecting it to other services you already use. This brings together email contacts and contacts from your service / social accounts in one easy to access and use place that roams across your Windows 8 PCs and phone. In this post, Jeff Kunins, a group program manager on the Windows Live team, details the People app. This is the first of a series of posts on the new service-connected apps that are currently in App Preview."

Internet Explorer 10

  • Advances in JavaScript Performance in IE10 and Windows 8 (IEBlog)

    • "Thursday, May 31, 2012, we delivered the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Sixth IE10 Platform Preview. Windows 8 includes one HTML5 browsing engine that powers both browsing experiences (Metro style and desktop) as well as Metro style applications that use HTML5 and JavaScript. The release preview represents a major revision of the same modern JavaScript engine, Chakra, which first debuted with IE9. With each platform preview we make progress against our goals to create an engine that delivers great performance on the Web while ensuring that it is highly compatible, interoperable, and secure. This post will explore how the JavaScript engine has been enhanced to deliver great performance for emerging Web application scenarios."

Expression Blend

  • Video Demo: Editing Groupstyles in Blend and VS 2012 (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

    • "A number of Metro style apps use a hierarchical system of navigation. This is an intuitive and common pattern used by app developers. In this video tutorial, I'll show you how to style and customize GroupStyles using Blend and VS to implement the hierarchical navigation system. Apps that have a large amount of content organized into categories or groups benefit from using the hierarchical navigation pattern. The entry point for the user in this pattern is the hub page. The content here is displayed in a rich horizontally panning view with different categories of content..."

Metro App Development

  • Modal Dialogs in Windows 8 Metro (Diederik Krols)

    • "This article describes how to create modal dialogs in a Windows 8 MVVM Metro-style app. Here's the use case: a main page opens a dialog and provides it with some information. The dialog is displayed in the center of the screen, and collects some information. As long as the dialog is open, the main page is inaccessible by the user interface. When the dialog is closed, the main page reads the result from the dialog, and continues processing."

  • Updating Single Items in WinJS List on Windows 8 (Jeff Brand)

    • "One of the most useful features in WinJS is it's support to data bind. There are lots of examples of how to bind data using WinJS.Binding.List, including creating, adding and removing items that are then displayed using a ListView. The one example that seems to be missing, however, is how to update a single item in your array and have the changes show up in the ListView. I searched the forums and found some ideas around updating individual HTML UI elements that displayed the changing data properties. Seemed a bit messy. There were other ideas about updating the data then having the ListView do a refresh with a call to forceRefresh(). Severe overkill IMHO and had the annoying result of the entire ListView refreshing and playing the default animation. Because I didn't see a solution that would just update a single item and have the changes that item reflected in the ListView, I fiddled around and came up with this approach."

  • Wiring up OData usage from Windows 8 Metro App (Samidip Basu)

    • "At hand, is a Windows 8 Release Preview Metro app that we are building for a client. Traditional technician-out-with-a-tablet setup; so offline access & later data sync with server DB is called for. The immediate answer is OData, as a service on top of backend Database .. seamlessly & asynchronously read/write data through plain HTTP. I have done OData CRUD numerous times in Windows Phone, web or Silverlight .. this should be a piece of cake! Yeah, right .. what ensued was a few hours of frustration, trying to stitch together the moving pieces & beta software hurdles to overcome. So, here's my attempt to save someone a few hours .. don't you love writing blog posts which will be obsolete in a few weeks? Here's the tale..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Buddy - world's first BaaS for Windows 8! (Buddy Blog)

    • "As you know, we pride ourselves on being THE most cross-platform backend as a service (BaaS) offering on the market. If you want to build an app with clients on iPhone, Android, the web, Windows Phone and a Facebook app - then Buddy is your solution. We're across ALL those platforms and more. In a world-first, last week we released a new version of our .NET SDK. You can find the binaries and more details here: http://buddy.com/documentation.aspx#SDKs_and_Samples. With this version we completed our initial goal of covering all the existing Buddy APIs as well as providing support for all the different .NET platforms and runtimes. This means that we now support: plain-old .NET, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, WinPhone and yes Windows 8. On top of that we now support Push Notifications on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone (as well as iOS and Android)..."

Other

  • Using C# 5 caller info attributes when targeting earlier versions of the .NET framework (Thomas Levesque)

    • "Caller info attributes are one of the new features of C# 5. They're attributes applied to optional method parameters that enable you to pass caller information implicitly to a method. ... Now, suppose we use Visual Studio 2012 to target an earlier framework version (e.g. 4.0): the caller info attributes don't exist in 4.0, so we can't use them... But wait! What if we could trick the compiler into thinking the attributes exist? Let's define our own attributes, taking care to put them in the namespace where the compiler expects them..."