Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-03

posted on 02 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $39.99 (The Windows Blog)

    • "We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8. Starting at general availability, if your PC is running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 you will qualify to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99 in 131 markets. And if you want, you can add Windows Media Center for free through the "add features" option within Windows 8 Pro after your upgrade. When you use Windows.com to purchase an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant makes upgrading simple by walking you through the upgrade process step-by-step from purchase to download and then of course installation..."

Windows Phone 8

  • Recapping Windows Phone 8 developer news (The Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "It's been a week since we unveiled Windows Phone 8 to the world at the Windows Phone Summit. As the person responsible for our new developer platform, I thought I'd take a moment to recap some of our key developer announcements in case you missed them..."

  • First look at the Windows Phone 8 Marketplace (The Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "Greetings from Amsterdam. I'm speaking at Microsoft's TechEd Europe event this week and wanted to share some of what I've been telling audiences here about the new Windows Phone 8 Marketplace—including the list of new markets and new money-making opportunities that Windows Phone 8 makes possible. Before digging in, let me add the same important caveat that everyone has been repeating all week: This is just the beginning of what we'll be saying about Windows Phone 8 and the new store for apps and games in the weeks and months ahead..."

Internet Explorer 10

  • Test the Web Forward (IEBlog)

    • "The quality and correctness of different browsers' HTML5 engines continue to vary widely. We continue to contribute to the test suites under development at W3C to further the goal of web platform interoperability and same markup. In total, we have submitted 7573 tests that you can view at the IE Test Center as well. As different browsers improve their same-markup support, we can all realize the promise of HTML5. ... Volunteers spent most of their Saturday writing new test cases for the CSS OM, Transforms, Backgrounds & Borders, Exclusions, SVG, and other modules. Participants were then nominated for several prizes..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio 2012 Tip: Refactor your Code easily (Kunal Chowdhury)

    • "Today in this post, we will learn about the Refactor feature of Visual Studio 2012 which will again improve your productivity without using any additional tools or extensions. So, continue reading this post to learn about this feature of new Visual Studio IDE..."

  • Visual Studio 2012 Tip: Improve Productivity using Enhanced Solution Explorer (Kunal Chowdhury)

    • "Today in this productivity improvement post, we will know about the enhanced version of the Solution Explorer. It is not new and was available in earlier versions too but in this new release they added new enhancements for the developers. Check out the complete post to know about it and it's benefits..."

Metro App Development

  • Modernizing input in Windows 8 (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "In Windows 8, we set out to modernize our input platform. We wanted to make sure that developing for it became more straightforward, but also to build a foundation that can grow and support new input modalities as Windows and apps evolve. To do this, we went back to basics and focused on core principles that guide our design. In this blog post I share with you why these principles matter, and how you can take advantage of the platform to build great apps in Windows 8..."

  • [Metro Style Application] V3.0 Certification requirements (preview) (Windows Dev Center)

    • "Important: This is a preview version of the Windows 8 app certification requirements and is provided is for your information only. See Certification requirements for the current version of this document. In this document, we describe the criteria an app must meet to be eligible for listing in the Windows Store..."

  • Windows 8: The right way to Read & Write Files in WinRT (Jerry Nixon)

    • "Windows 8 Metro development leverages WinRT; and, in WinRT, there are new namespaces - and namespace constriction in the .Net Framework. What you think you know, you may not. MSDN: In some cases, a type that you used in a .NET Framework desktop app doesn't exist within the .NET APIs for Metro style apps. Instead, you can use a type from the Windows Runtime. For example, the System. IO. IsolatedStorage. IsolatedStorageSettings class isn't included in the .NET APIs for Metro style apps, but the Windows.Storage.ApplicationDataContainer class provides similar behavior for storing app settings. Examples of common changes you might have to make are included in the section Converting your existing .NET Framework code..."

  • WinJS Listview : itemtemplates, templating functions and more (Jonathan Antoine)

    • "The ListView is the most used control of WinJS in Windows 8 metro apps. It's build with three things : the data, a layout and an item templates. In this post, we will discover the different way to provide an item template and how to customize it..."

  • A few facts about Microsoft's new Windows Runtime (Tim Anderson)

    • "I've just come out of Martyn Lovell's talk on WinRT internals here at BUILD in Anaheim, California. Make no mistake: Microsoft has re-invented the Windows API in WinRT. Just to recap, WinRT is the API for Metro-style applications, the touch-centric, app-centric API for tablets and, one presumes, eventually for Windows Phone (though Microsoft has yet to admit it). WinRT is only useable from Metro applications. You cannot call WinRT from a Win32 application, nor vice versa*..."

  • Using LINQ to Twitter OAuth with Windows 8 (Joe Mayo)

    • "In previous posts, I explained how to use LINQ to Twitter with Windows 8, but the example was a Twitter Search, which didn't require authentication. Much of the Twitter API requires authentication, so this post will explain how you can perform OAuth authentication with LINQ to Twitter in a Windows 8 Metro-style application..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • All my XAML/C#/SharpDx demos (Jose Fajardo)

    • "As promised here is all my samples in one huge project, and working on Windows 8 Release Preview (RP). It is only demo code and I follow a very loose way of programming, which means I pay more attention to getting things done creatively than in frameworks and coding styles..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • Introducing Windows.UI.Interactivity: Behaviors for the Windows Runtime (Johan Laanstra)

    • "In the Windows Runtime and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 there are no behaviors. This brings lots of problems when you are using the MVVM pattern or you come from the Windows Phone or Silverlight platform. Windows.UI.Interactivity tries to fill this gap by porting the whole System.Windows.Interactivity assembly, where the behaviors live in the Blend SDK, to the Windows Runtime. The project builts on work done by Windows Phone MVP Joost van Schaik a.k.a. LocalJoost and Silverlight MVP Andrea Boschin..."