Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-20

posted on 19 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Internet Explorer 10

  • Adapting Your Site to Different Window Sizes (IEBlog)

    • "IE10 in the Windows 8 Release Preview supports the width and height properties of the W3C Working Draft CSS Device Adaptation. This gives Web developers a simple tool to control automatic content scaling across various window dimensions. In particular, it enables Web sites to easily adapt to Windows 8 Metro style browser in the snapped view and portrait orientation."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio 2012 New Features: Preview Tab (Zain Naboulsi)

    • "We all explore code and need to move quickly between files when examining code to get familiar with it or debugging or [insert file browsing scenario here]. In prior versions of Visual Studio you had to open a file to look at the contents which often resulted in many open files (tabs) when you were done. The Preview Tab eliminates the need to open files when browsing code. Most likely you'll first encounter the Preview Tab when you are looking at files with Solution Explorer. When you click on a supported file type, you will see the contents of that file in the new preview tab (to the far right in the tab well)..."

  • Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 RC (Microsoft Patterns & Practices)

    • "This guide describes how testing has been changing over the years and how the testing infrastructure you can build with Visual Studio 2012 RC will help you achieve continuous delivery of your software projects. This guide provides an end-to-end walkthrough of the testing scenarios supported by the Visual Studio 2012 RC infrastructure. It will help testers and developers use Team Foundation Server effectively as an application lifecycle management solution for testing and supporting products."

Metro App Development

  • Developing a Windows 8 Metro App Part 1: Why Would You Want to Develop a Metro Application for Windows 8? (Jennifer Marsman)

    • "This post kicks off another blog post series on developing a Metro application for Windows 8. But, before I spend the rest of this series describing HOW to develop, let me devote one post to WHY you might want to develop a Windows 8 application and publish it in the Windows Store. One of the things that I'm most psyched about for Windows 8 is the Windows Store. This is an online marketplace where developers can publish applications and all end users of Windows 8 can download them. The Windows Store will be the primary mechanism for distributing Metro apps..."

  • Portable Libraries and the Windows App Certification Kit RC [Nick] (Base Class Library (BCL) Blog)

    • "Visual Studio 2012 includes built-in support for Portable Class Libraries that can be used to share code between .NET applications targeting multiple platforms, for example, between Windows Phone and Windows 8 Metro style apps. We've received reports that the Windows App Certification Kit (ACK) currently fails to load some portable libraries with an error in the debug configuration test step similar to ... Failed to process the binary PortableClassLibrary1.dll. This is a bug in the RC version of the tools, and will be fixed to enable full support for Portable Class Libraries for Windows 8 RTM."

  • C# 5.0 Async Tips and Tricks, Part 1 (Jérôme Laban)

    • "This article is a discussion about how C#5.0 async captures the executing context when running an async method, which allows to easily stay on the UI Thread to access UI elements, but can be problematic when running CPU-bound work. Off of the UI thread, an async method may jump from thread to thread, breaking thread context dependent code along with it."

  • WinRT Poster (Ali Taki)

    • "After navigating the WinRT, I thought it will be a good idea to put the main namespaces all together in one poster. It looked helpfull as below..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • DirectX Tool Kit (CodePlex)

    • "DirectX Tool Kit (aka DirectXTK) is a collection of helper classes for writing Direct3D 11 code for Metro style apps, Windows 8 Desktop, and Windows 7 'classic' applications in C++."

Tools

  • NuGet 2.0 Released (NuGet Blog)

    • "We're happy to announce that we released NuGet 2.0 on 6/19/2012. This release includes support for grouping dependencies, tools and content by the target framework of the project. Additionally, we've dramatically improved the performance of tab completion in the package management console. Package restore consent is now active."

  • dotCover 2.0 is Released (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)

    • "JetBrains developers and QA engineers are finally going to have some sleep since dotCover 2.0 RTM is available right now for you to download. Here's the list of features that make this a worthy upgrade: Support for Visual Studio 2012 RC along with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010; Integrated unit test runner; dotCover 2.0 adds attribute filters and a redesigned filter management UI; Locate in coverage tree."

  • Tenth offical release of NCrunch! (1.40b) (Remco Mulder)

    • "It's now been over 13 months since the first beta of NCrunch went up on this website. It's very satisfying to see how far the tool has progressed in its features, speed and stability. More than any other project I've worked on, NCrunch has so clearly demonstrated how effective an iterative and exploratory approach to developing software can be. I want to thank everyone for their efforts in helping to report problems and suggest the features that have made NCrunch the success it is today. Without a doubt, the best way I can think of to offer my gratitude for this is with another release of NCrunch!"