Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-05

posted on 04 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 2012

  • July 2012 Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 RC (Microsoft Download Center)

    • "July 2012 Update for Visual Studio 2012 RC is a small patch that provides fixes and improvements for the Visual Studio development environment."

  • Lifting ForEach, Breaking Change in Visual Studio 2012 (Kathleen Dollard)

    • "There's a breaking change you should know about in Visual Studio 2012. In case you have a short attention span, aka have a life, I'll give you the punch line first. The behavior of closures has changed in the specific instance of a lambda expression..."

  • Fresh off the Press - "Time-Saving Features in Visual Studio 2012 and ASPNET 4.5" Free E-book (Telerik Blogs)

    • "Josh and myself have spent quite a lot of time with Visual Studio 2012 and ASP.NET 4.5 and have stumbled across some really awesome gems that we wanted to share with the developer community. So we took these gems and put together an ebook called "Time-Saving Features in Visual Studio 2012 and ASPNET 4.5". This ebook contains an overview of the features that we found to be the most helpful and that overall help you as a developer do one thing; save time..."

Metro App Development

  • Getting Started with Metro, Js and Blend (Timmy Kokke)

    • "In this first tutorial in a series about building a Windows 8 application with JavaScript, HMTL and CSS using Expression Blend 5, we're going to make a start on a very simple game. In this game the player has to guess a random number between 1 and 10. The player wins if the guess is correct, and looses if it's wrong. In future parts of the series this game will be extended to include various features of WinJS and Windows 8..."

  • Basic Direct2D drawing with SharpDX (Rodrigo Díaz)

    • "If you are an experienced DirectX programmer chances are you used the DirectDraw API for 2D drawing. If not, here's a quick summary: it was used for quickly copying parts of one image to another using binary operations ("bit blitting"). This was a quick and good enough method for paletted or low BPP images, but if you wanted to do more advanced operations like rotation or alpha blending you had to implement your own software solution. With the advent of 3D graphics cards, hardware 2D support was phased out in favor of 3D acceleration, and this set the demise of DirectDraw..."

  • Tips and tricks for C# metro developers-The FileExistsAsync method (David Catuhe)

    • "Today I share with you a small (but useful) piece of code. Indeed, for now WinRT does not provide a method to test the existence of a specific file. You can only try/catch an GetFileAsync call and it can be disappointing. So here is a little solution..."

  • How to Create new IStorageFiles in WinRT (C#) (Derik Whittaker)

    • "When building WinRT applications there will be the need to create IStorageFiles in the local storage area of your application. In this post I was going to walk through how we can do this step by step..."

  • Progress Ring Control in Metro Style Apps (Shubham Srivastava)

    • "This article is an introduction to the progress ring control, one of the advanced controls of Metro Style Applications. This control has the same purpose as the old progress control to show progress of an ongoing process except it has more features and properties. Here we will use the progress ring control on a Save button and show the ongoing process of saving data from a list..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Using xUnit to test Metro Style Applications (Oren Novotny)

    • "Many people would like to use xUnit to test their Metro-style applications. While this isn't yet currently possible with the main xUnit binaries, I have updated the code to get it working on WinRT. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, I've created a Project Template that'll make it a snap to get started..."