Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-27

posted on 26 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Introducing the Photos app for Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Wrapping up our series of posts on some of the new apps in Windows 8, we take a look at the new Photos app. With this app, along with Metro style design principles, we set out to design an app that allows you to bring together photos from many different sources and to then view and share them. Brad Weed, a group program manager in the Windows Live team authored this post"

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio 2012 New Features: Quick Launch (Zain Naboulsi)

    • "In the past, finding things deep in the IDE has been a challenge. Visual Studio 2012 introduces search abilities at virtually every level of the product. Perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of Quick Launch (CTRL + Q) which specifically addresses how to dig inside Visual Studio to find features you need. Let's take a look..."

Metro App Development

  • Best practices when adding single sign-on to your app with the Live SDK (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "A few months ago I wrote about how to bring single sign-on and SkyDrive to your Windows 8 apps with the Live SDK. Since then we made the Windows 8 Release Preview publicly available and we've begun to see some inconsistency in the design patterns forming in how apps expose entry points for users to sign in, connect accounts or sign-out of their experience. To help you with these design patterns, we put together some guidelines for apps that want to use a user's Microsoft account. In this post I share those guidelines with you and show you some code for how to get started..."

  • Windows 8 XAML Tips - Show a task pane (Fons Sonnemans)

    • "You can integrate the look and feel introduced in Windows 8 Release Preview into your Metro style app by using the Animation Library suite of Windows-provided animations. ... One of the animations that are supplied in the Animation Library is the show hide panel animation. You use it to show and hide a panel, which is large edge-based UI such as a custom keyboard or a task pane. This 'Windows Animation (Metro styled apps)' article shows you how you can use the PaneThemeTransition animation class in XAML..."

  • Windows 8: Advanced Live Tiles, Part 2 (Eric Vogel)

    • "In part 1 of this series, I covered how to add secondary live tiles to your application. Today I'll cover how to schedule periodical updates of live tiles. The first thing needed is a Web service from which to pull tiles and badges. Start by creating a new ASP.NET MVC 4 project..."

  • Binding To Event At Runtime In Windows 8 Metro (Camron Bute)

    • "So I wanted to use the MVVM pattern in Win8 Metro WPF, but was without the classes and functionality I would use in WPF4. So I decided to create my own, but I got the error: Adding or removing event handlers dynamically is not supported on WinRT events. I found a blog post on the MSDN where some guy posted about using the WindowsRuntimeMarshal to get around that, but he didn't post a code sample. So, I decided to figure it out, and let everyone know! So here's the code..."

  • Creating an IStorageFile out of a Local Resource in WinRT (C#) (Derik Whittaker)

    • "When working with a C#/XAML WinRT application it is common that you will include resources such as images, files, audio recordings, etc inside your deployment package. It will also be common that you may want to access these resources as native storage files in order to do things like share them between applications. Accessing these files is actually pretty easy and is only about 3 lines of code..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Designing MetroTwit for Windows 8 (Long Zheng)

    • "We know it's still a bit rough around the edges and not feature complete but we hope it offers a teaser of what we think will be a compelling Twitter app for Windows 8 users. Designing MetroTwit for Windows 8 was no walk in the park. We couldn't simply copy and paste our desktop application's source code; WPF code doesn't port to WinRT as well as you may have heard. But regardless, that code wasn't designed for touch. A tough challenge to say the least. Fortunately we had the opportunity to work with some experienced Microsoft folks who provided invaluable feedback to form the design you see today. It's a whole new (and better) app from the ground up..."