Windows App Developer Links - 2012-06-29

Visual Studio 2012

• Visual Studio 2012 New Features: Code Clone Analysis (Zain Naboulsi)

  • "In my travels across the country, with my fellow Evangelist, Clint Edmonson, talking about Visual Studio we often come across great stories to tell. One of our favorite true stories is of a customer that had a web application running very slow. We ran code metrics against it and, sure enough, the Page_Load event had 9,000 lines of code in it. Naturally we were curious so we opened it up to see that it was basically the same if statement copied over and over. Apparently they needed to find out who was coming into the website in order to show customized content and the solution they came up with was this massive set of statements. For better or worse we have all had code that gets copied throughout our solutions. Until now there was no tool to tell us there were copies and, instead, we had to rely on other metrics to hopefully reveal any code smells that lead us to duplicates. Now, however, we have the new Code Clone Detection (aka Code Clone Analysis) feature..."

Metro App Development

• Seeding your Metro style app with a SQLite database (Tim Heuer)

  • "It looks like people are really glad about being able to use SQLite within their Metro style apps. I had written two previous posts (Using SQLite in your Metro style app and HOWTO: Build and include SQLite) about this topic. I'm pleased to report that since those posts the SQLite team released a build (3.7.13 as of the datestamp on this post) which also provides the binary (32- and 64-bit versions) pre-compiled for you for inclusion in your Metro style app. You can get them from the SQLite download page. I've received a few comments/questions that I thought I might clarify in my own opinion (and some facts) about using SQLite in your app..."

• XAML binding resources from a separate assembly (Bart Lannoeye)

  • "Following the session that Glenn (twitter) and I presented at Community Day 2012 as members of the Belgian Windows Phone User Group, we're writing a couple of posts explaining the topics and showing some code. In this post we're handling the use of resources in your Windows 8 Metro application. As your Windows 8 application can be made available word-wide through the marketplace, there's no discussion that you should localize the app to target this global market. Before Windows 8, if you were doing XAML development (WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone), you could use data binding techniques to do the mapping from the RESX-generated class to the XAML UI. By placing the resource reference at the application level (App.xaml) it wasn't too hard to do your localization. But now with Windows 8, it got even a lot easier: the app already loads your resource files and there's a new way of binding in XAML using the x:Uid attribute..."

• Learn to build Metro style apps (Windows Dev Center)

  • "Begin building Metro style apps quickly and easily. Our getting started guide walks you through the essentials of writing your first app. Get Started..."