Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-04

posted on 03 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Readying Metro style apps for launch (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "We know many folks are looking forward to RTM. Developers currently working on apps in the Store are especially excited. We have hundreds of apps in the Windows Store now and many more on the way. There's a broad set of developers around the world that we have been working closely with since the first Developer Preview. ... This post explains the work we've been doing since September to keep developers updated with APIs and tools so that apps can stay up to date. We're doing this even after the Release Preview, just to make sure new apps are ready to go once we get to broad availability. This post was authored by Dennis Flanagan, who leads our ecosystem outreach team."

  • Windows 8: Building Up to Blank (Jeremy Foster)

    • "When you're learning a new platform or development stack or seeing something for the first time, it's an exercise in concept building. If you don't get the concepts down then you may as well be a monkey walking through steps. And sometimes when you start with a project template, so much has been done for you that grasping concepts involves separating what is fundamental to the technology and what has been done for you by the tooling. ... I'm going to use Visual Studio 11 (Consumer Preview) and start with a truly blank HTML/JavaScript project and work us up to the blank project - that is - work us up to the project template that you get with VS11, which although it's called blank is not quite."

  • Tests in Javascript Metro Applications (Per Ökvist)

    • "One thing I miss in the tools and templates around HTML5/Javascript development for Windows 8 is a test strategy, or at least some encouragement in the templates to send you in that direction. There is no test runner for metro apps using Javascript in the tools today. ... Before I got into getting Qunit or Jasmine to run in my app I did some research, and I found some useful tools and samples that I thought I share in this post..."

  • Semantic Zoom In Windows 8 Metro Applications (Shiva Vitakula)

    • "Semantic zoom is a technique used for presenting and navigating large data sets with in single view. ... Panning and Scrolling are great for small sets of data; however navigation becomes cumbersome for huge data sets as above. Semantic zoom is tailored made for these situations..."

  • Windows 8 Metro: Improve GridView and ListView with SemanticZoom and Incremental Loading (Andrea Boschin)

    • "In the previous article from this series I've explored the main controls that support the new user experience in metro style applications. GridView, ListView and FlipView are a big help to fully embrace the metro-styled experience and having a deep knowledge about their features is important to develop effective applications. In this number I would want to go for two advanced features I've skipped in the introduction. I'm referring to Semantic Zoom, that is the ability to coordinate the content of two controls to easily explore a collection, and to Incremental Loading that let you load items in chunks when they're really needed..."

  • How the WinJS.UI.ViewBox Actually Works (Jeremy Foster)

    • "I just learned something about the WinJS.UI.ViewBox and wanted to share. I have known for some time what the ViewBox does, but I recently learned how it does it. First, let me reiterate what the ViewBox does. I compared its functionality to the FlexBox in my When to Use ViewBoxes and FlexBoxes post. The ViewBox itself snaps to the size of the container it is in and resizes its child (without changing its aspect ratio) to fit. How does it actually do that? It's pretty cool. It does it with a CSS transform. If you create a ViewBox and then look at the DOM Explorer, you'll see something like this..."

  • WinRT: Example of Using Periodic Notifications for Live Tiles (Mikael Koskinen)

    • "Both the Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps have live tiles which can be controlled by the developer. But where the Windows Phone tiles have the front and back sides, Windows 8 tiles have a notification queue. Live tile's notification queue can be used to show multiple different messages to the user, like the latest news items or recent emails. Here's some example code which shows how to use the notification queue in a Windows 8 Metro app and how to update the queue periodically using a ASP.NET Web Api backend..."

  • Azure WNS to Win8 - Push Notifications for Metro Apps (Josh Reuben)

    • "The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 allows you to build a Windows Azure Cloud Service that can send Push Notifications to registered Metro apps via Windows Notification Service (WNS). These notifications take the form of XAML Tile, Toast, Raw or Badge UI notifications. The core engine is provided via the WNS nuget recipe, which exposes an API for constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS..."

  • Tips and tricks for C# metro developers-The Flyout control (David Catuhe)

    • "This article starts a new series about small (but I hope useful) tips that can help you during your development phase. Today I will talk about how you can create a flyout control. A flyout control is a popup control you can make appear when you click on a button. I used this control for WorldMonger (a game I currently working on)..."