Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-21

posted on 20 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Internet Explorer 10

  • Go Beyond Pan, Zoom, and Tap Using Gesture Events (IEBlog)

    • "Based on your feedback, we've improved how sites can build advanced touch experiences using gesture events in IE10 on the Windows 8 Release Preview. Earlier we wrote about first steps Web developers should take to make sure their sites are touch-friendly and how to build new experiences that work well across input devices, including multi-touch, using hardware agnostic pointer events. This post covers IE10's gesture events. An example of gesture events is the Browser Surface Test Drive demo shown below..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • The Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool: A better way to submit bugs (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "Microsoft Visual Studio has had a long and successful run over the last decade plus, and much of that success has been through the partnership with our customers along the way. We believe that you can build better products through better conversations, and our feedback channels are intended to help us listen and respond to the things you tell us as you work with our products on a daily basis. With upwards of 50 million lines of code, broad changes to Visual Studio can take some time to fully incorporate... we are constantly looking for new ways to provide more frequent updates to the product..."

  • Visual Studio 2012 RC - What's new in Code Coverage (Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog)

    • "As product development adapts to the demands of continuous delivery models and agile methodologies, the developer is being entrusted with bringing in product changes with a higher quality bar. Besides strengthening processes to include quality checkpoints like gated check-ins, rolling builds and other regression checks, the developer can provide a higher degree of confidence in their code by ensuring that all product code changes are accompanied by a strong suite of unit tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) is one excellent step towards this. Since unit tests are owned and maintained by the developers, they can ensure that these tests are healthy and at a 100% pass rate prior to any code being committed to source control. This helps to maintain the basic sanity of product code..."

  • Windows Identity Foundation Tools for Visual Studio 2012 RC (Vittorio Bertocci)

    • "They're out, folks. Few minutes ago Marc flipped the switch on the refresh of the WIF tools for the RC of Visual Studio 2012. There's not a lot of news, this was mostly a stabilization effort; if you want to learn about what the tools do, the original posts we did for Beta are still valid. Also, last week I gave a presentation at TechEd USA about what's new in WIF 4.5: the tools took a fairly big portion of the talk, so if you prefer videos to written text head to the recording on Channel9..."

Expression Blend

  • Video Demo: Working with the Xaml Appbar in Blend and Vs 2012 (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

    • "AppBars provide the user with easy access to commands when required. The user can swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen to make app bars appear and can interact with their content to make app bars disappear. App bars can also be used to show commands or options that are specific to the user's context. Keep the Windows design guidance for app bars in mind any time you are working with them. There is a complete set of Guidelines and Checklist for app bars published on the Windows Developer Center..."

Metro App Development

  • Developing a Windows 8 Metro App Part 2: Getting Started (Jennifer Marsman)

    • "In yesterday's post, I explained why you might want to develop a Metro application for Windows 8. Today, let's get started on the "how". Set up a machine for development..."

  • Reflection in WinRT: DeclaredProperties vs GetRuntimeProperties caveat (Joost van Schaik)

    • "I suppose this is part of some FM I did not R, but I would like to point it out in case some other sod wastes just as much time on it as me. I embarked upon a journey to port SilverlightSerializer and some behaviors to WinRT. All stuff is heavily making use of reflection. Now reflection has been hugely overhauled in WinRT, so I knew I was in for an interesting ride. Recently I was convinced I managed to do it, but it turned out I did not. There are apparently two ways to use reflection in RT..."

  • Reflection in WinRT: use Rx Extensions for dynamically adding event handlers (Joost van Schaik)

    • "Suppose you want to add an event handler, but you don't know up front which event. Admittedly, this is a bit of an edge case, but I have used it in a behavior that starts a storyboard upon an event (I will publish that later). The designer can specify the event using a string value in XAML, so I cannot simply use object.MyEvent += (handler). We need reflection here..."

  • Why your WinJS app may navigate back when a textbox is in focus and you hit enter (Adam Kinney)

    • "It sounds kind of obscure, but it could happen to you. While developing an application, you navigate to a page with a textbox and out of habit you press the enter key and your app navigates back to the previous page, losing your entered text. Why, why would this happen? Who thought it was a good idea to add it to the template? The good news is this is not intentional..."

Other

  • Windows Phone 8 in detail: new Start Screen, multi-core support, VoIP integration, and NFC (The Verge)

    • "Microsoft is lifting the curtain to provide a preview of some of the software and hardware changes for its Windows Phone 8 operating system today. NFC, dual- and quad-core support are all set, and Microsoft has shifted over to the NT kernel for Windows Phone 8 to make it even easier for developers to code for its mobile and desktop ecosystems. There's a new Wallet hub, deeper integration of Skype, and an updated Start Screen interface with support for small tiles. Despite the improvements and hardware support, Microsoft will not release this particular update to existing devices. Instead, the company plans to rollout a Windows Phone 7.8 update separately that will bring some of Windows Phone 8's user interface changes to existing devices, but many of the other improvements will require new hardware..."