Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-28

posted on 27 Jun 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 2012

  • Install Published Samples with Visual Studio (The Visual Basic Team)

    • "You can use Visual Studio 2012 RC to download and install samples from the MSDN Code Gallery. You can download only the samples you need, or you can download one or more Sample Packs, which group several samples that relate to a technology or topic. You'll receive a notification if source code changes are published for any sample that you download..."

Expression Blend

  • Introducing the Blend Class Attribute Editor for Html (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

    • "One way Blend supports designers is by providing a visual indication in the CSS Properties and HTML Attributes panes when JavaScript values have been set or have overwritten values assigned in markup. ... However, the class attribute can be assigned a list of space-separated class names. ... Blend includes a nifty value editor specifically designed for the HTML class attribute. You can use it to add, edit, and remove class names for selected elements. More importantly, you can see a visual indicator for each class name that indicates its state."

Metro App Development

  • Improving apps with Quality reports (Windows Store for developers)

    • "Previously, we described our Adoption reports. These reports provide you with information on downloads, adoption rate, user ratings and usage which, together, can help you determine the popularity of your app. Adoption reports are useful, but they're just a part of the reporting tools we provide in the Windows Store. We also provide reports related to app quality. These reports help you measure and improve the quality of your app. In this post, program manager Kalyan Venkatasubramanian describes the Store's Quality reports and how you can use them to improve your apps."

  • Process Lifetime Management (PLM) and Managing State in Windows 8 Metro C# Applications (Jeremy Likness)

    • "In the traditional Windows environment, the user manages the lifetime of their applications. The user launches the application and it continues to run until the user decides to close it. The problem with this model is that applications continue to drain system resources, including memory and CPU, even when they are not in the foreground. This impacts the performance of the application the user is using as well as drains the battery faster when the device is not plugged in..."

  • Sharing Data Between LOB Windows 8 Metro Style Apps Part 1 (Ahmed El-Ramly)

    • "I recently wrote a post where I delved into the Windows 8 Charms for LOB apps. I spent some time talking about using the Search charm to not only look for data on your Windows 8 device/computer, but to also search into data for Metro apps that is either stored offline or in back end systems. This capability is very useful for LOB Metro apps to utilize as it unifies the search experience for your users. ... Today I want to dive into this further as this powerful feature can really help create some wonderful user experiences for LOB apps."

  • Sharing Data Between LOB Windows 8 Metro Style Apps Part 2 (Ahmed El-Ramly)

    • "In my last post, I started looking into how one could share data between Metro Style Apps that were more complex than the typical URLs, bitmaps, text and files. I went in to an example of sharing a Person object based on http://schema.org/Person and having one app share data about a selected person for another app to consume. Today, I will go into showing how that other app will consume that complex data format."

  • Working With Live Tiles in Windows 8 Metro App-Part 2 (Rohit Shaw)

    • "In my previous article, I explained the basics about tile as well as showed you how to send tile notifications step by step. In this article, I will show you another demo with another XML template, in which the notification will include an image along with the text. Also in this article, I will tell you how to clear the notifications."

  • Badge Notifications in Windows 8 (Rohit Shaw)

    • "Badge is a type of Push Notification available in Windows 8. It is displayed over the top of a tile. Badges are small icons that are shown in the lower right corner of a tile. The tile can either be a default tile or a tile with a notification. A badge can display either a number from 1-99 or a status glyph. ... You can have a full overview about number badges and glyph badges from here..."

  • Flyout control in XAML through Callisto for Windows 8 (Glenn Versweyveld)

    • "Here we are with part 3 and this time we will be talking about using the appbar and implementing a Flyout Control. ... But why would we need to put a blog post up about it, well because if you go through all the examples on the MSDN site, you'll notice that there is no XAML version available!! Yep with Windows 8 RP there is still no XAML flyout control out of the box!"

  • Save objects to the 'LocalFolder' (Michael O.)

    • "This post will Show you how to serialize and save objects with XML to your apps LocalFolder/RoamingFolder. Metro style apps in Windows 8 have their own folders where they can store their data. These folders can be accessed by..."

  • Debug and run Windows 8 Metro style JavaScript apps (Rachel Appel)

    • "Once you have become familiar with WinJS app development basics, the next thing to do is run and debug your app, test it out, and see what the new IDE and tools can do. Debugging is a great way to manually verify the flow of your app, and when writing WinJS code, debugging sessions require the Windows Simulator (and of course, the built-in VS debugging tools)."

Tools

  • New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer (.NET Framework Blog)

    • "Productivity is the hallmark of programming with managed code. So often productivity boils down to figuring out why something isn't working - diagnostics. The CLR provides one of the best foundations for diagnostics. In this post, Richard Lander - a program manager for the Common Language Runtime - shows how more than just developers can now track down root causes for problems."

Other

  • Windows 8 App Showcase (Windows.Net)

    • "The intended purpose of this site is to hopefully show you what other developers/designers consider metro design." This site shows screenshots from various Metro Style apps on the Windows App Store. 50 Images per page.