Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-06

posted on 05 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Win8 Apps now supports ViewModel Dictionaries (Rohit Sharma)

    • "Working with the default Win8 Gridview app (generated via VS 2012 GridView Template), I found it now supports a new way to share and access multiple view-models for a given view. The idea is to bind the view's DataContext property to a dictionary object (where key is the name of the viewmodel, and value is the viewmodel itself), you can then refer the viewmodel from XAML/View via Binding markup such as {Binding KeyName}. In other words, the Binding markup now supports KeyNames on the IObservableMap (beside getter properties)..."

  • Using SQLite in your Windows 8 Metro style applications (Matteo Pagani)

    • "As a little surprise for developers, Windows 8 doesn't come out with native database support. In the past months some SQLite portings came out, but none of the them was working really good. After the Windows Phone Summit (where Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8), the situation started to be more clear: SQLite will be the database officialy supported by Microsoft and SQLite will be officially released both for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. This way it's likely to think that, as developers, we will be able to share not only the database but also the data access layer between the two platform: this will help us a lot porting our apps from one platform to the other. Now SQLite's branch for WinRT is available and we can start to use it to store the data of our applications, with the help of another library called sqlite-net, that provides LINQ based APIs to work with data, both with sync and async support..."

  • Resolution scaling of Windows 8 Metro apps (Jayway Blog)

    • "A high DPI screen is scaled so you can always ask for Bounds and get the normal DPI (dots per inch) result for a screen of that size. For example, set the simulator to 1920x1080 for a 10.6" screen and the Window.Current.Bounds will say ~ 1371x771 - which is close enough to 1366x768 which is the resolution for a normal DPI screen. Why does this matter? Well - you can adjust and adopt your UI to different screen sizes and resolutions by looking at the Bounds property."

  • Using Microsoft Web API from a Windows and WinRT Client Application (Sumit Maitra)

    • "Recently I posted on how the new Web API framework released with MVC4 Beta was designed to enable services over plain HTTP using HTTP verbs. So any Web API we create and expose for our application, is easily accessible from any client that can do an HTTP Post. In this post, we will see how we can create a Windows and WinRT application that connects to the Web APIs we exposed in our previous post and can retrieve and submit information..."

  • TileTemplateType enumeration (Windows Dev Center)

    • This Windows Dev Center page lists all 46 possible TileTemplateType (live tile layout) values along with descriptions and pictures of the layout. A very handy reference.

  • Creating Enterprise Line of Business Apps for Windows 8 (Microsoft Download Center)

    • "Windows 8 is a great platform for building apps that increase productivity, ease deployment, and allow your employees to interact with their PC in a more natural way. This white paper provides information about how to design and develop Enterprise Line of Business (LOB) Metro style apps for Windows 8. It provides guidelines and advice for developers who want to take advantage of the new capabilities in Windows 8. It also provides suggestions for how to leverage new form factors to create engaging experiences for enterprise users."

  • Introduction to Background Tasks (Microsoft Download Center)

    • "Windows 8 Release Preview provides Metro style apps with the ability to run app code, even when the app is suspended, by using background tasks. This paper describes the programming model to create background tasks, resource management policies for background tasks, and built-in user controls that allow the user to control per-app background task activity by using lock screen personalization. Some familiarity with Metro style app development is assumed."