Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-15

posted on 14 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Building the Mail app (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Hundreds of thousands of folks have been using the "App Preview" of Mail on a daily basis since the Windows 8 Release Preview. We've also been updating it along the way through the new Windows Store with more updates planned. In this post we go into the background of the Mail app and talk about the design and features, especially relative to Metro style design principles. This isn't an exhaustive list of Mail features or features yet to be added and primarily focuses on the design and integration with Windows 8. This post was written by Jeremy Epling, a lead program manager on the Windows Live team. This is the second in a series of posts on the new apps."

Internet Explorer 10

  • Under the Hood: Bubbles (IEBlog)

    • "In an earlier post we discussed JavaScript performance improvements introduced in IE10. Today we published Bubbles, originally inspired by Alex Gavriolov's simulation BubbleMark, to explore some of these advances. The current version has been greatly expanded to take advantage of the new features of the Web platform and includes characteristics common to HTML5 games. In this post we peek under the hood to see how the demo is constructed and examine the main factors that affect its performance..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Turn Off the Uppercase Menu in Visual Studio 2012 (Zain Naboulsi)

    • "I've been seeing a ton of posts lately on this feature so thought I would share here as well. I also like to give credit where credit is due so I did a search and it looks like the earliest mention of this ability is by Richard Banks in his post 6\1\2012 here: http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-studio-2012-all.html ... Okay so you really, really don't like the Uppercase menu in VS2012 because you feel like it is shouting at you. You would rather go back to mixed case for your menu. Not a problem! Let's see how..."

Metro App Development

  • Exposing .NET tasks as WinRT asynchronous operations (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "In the blog post Diving Deep with Await and WinRT, we discussed the new async and await keywords in C# and Visual Basic and how you can use them to consume Windows Runtime (WinRT) asynchronous operations. With some assistance from the .NET Base Class Libraries (BCL), you can also use these keywords to develop asynchronous operations that are then exposed via WinRT for other components built in other languages to consume. In this post, we'll explore how to do so. (For overall details on implementing WinRT components with C# or Visual Basic, see Creating Windows Runtime Components in C# and Visual Basic.) Let's start by reviewing the shape of asynchronous APIs in WinRT..."

  • How to provide cloud-based, JSON data to Windows 8 Metro Grid Applications - Part 2 (Bruno Terkaly)

    • "This post will focus on the data model used by this type of application. We need to understand how data is modeled if we plan to architect a cloud-based back-end. The next few screens will talk a lot about SampleDataGroup and SampleDataItem objects. These are the core data objects used by a Windows 8 Metro Grid Application..."

  • Adventures in Windows 8: Handling With HTTP 302 Responses in WinRT (Frank La Vigne)

    • "I'm currently working on porting an app of mine from the phone to Windows 8 Metro. Since I have a lot more real estate to play with on Windows 8 than on the phone and do so love a good technical challenge, I decide to add more features to the Win8 version. Many of these features are user-specific and require logging into the site. Since there's no publicly documented API, I've been doing all this via screen scraping. This approach has been pretty successful on the phone with my handy little library and embodies the spirit of my Screen Scraper's Manifesto: if you don't provide us developers with an API, we will make our own..."

  • NavigationService for WinRT (Joost van Schaik)

    • "It was only 1.5 years ago, but it seems already a long time ago that Laurent Bugnion described a "view service" for Windows Phone navigation, commonly know as the NavigationService. I've incorporated this code in my #wp7nl library on codeplex and have been using it happily ever since (and a lot of other people I know have been doing so as well), Time goes on, along came Windows 8 and WinRT and Metro Style Apps. Laurent ported his MVVMLight framework to WinRT as well. But the NavigationService never has been a core part of MVVMLight (therefore I put it in the #wp7nl library) and porting it to WinRT as well proved to be a bit of a hassle. ... And here it is, an improved version of a NavigationService for WinRT, based upon Matteo's code based upon Laurent's code..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • WriteableBitmapEx (Rene Schulte)

    • "The WriteableBitmapEx library is a collection of extension methods for the WriteableBitmap. The WriteableBitmap class is available for Windows Phone, WPF, WinRT Metro Style XAML and Silverlight and allows the direct manipulation of a bitmap and could be used to generate fast procedural images by drawing directly to a bitmap. The WriteableBitmap API is very minimalistic and there's only the raw Pixels array for such operations. The WriteableBitmapEx library tries to compensate that with extensions methods that are easy to use like built in methods and offer GDI+ like functionality. The library extends the WriteableBitmap class with elementary and fast (2D drawing) functionality, conversion methods and functions to combine (blit) WriteableBitmaps."