Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-11

posted on 10 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Protecting user files with File History (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Backing up your critical files is something we all know we should do. Even with everything in SkyDrive, it is still something we need to do. With Windows 8, we took a new look at the way backup can work and set out to solve the perennial problem of not just restoring all your files but restoring a previous version of a critical file you have been editing through the course of a day. To achieve this, we're introducing a new feature in Windows 8, File History. Bohdan Raciborski, a program manager on the Storage team authored this post..."

  • Microsoft shows off Windows 8 business app 'concepts' (Mary Jo Foley)

    • "At its Convergence conference for Dynamics ERP and CRM customers and partners, which kicks off on March 19, Microsoft will show off early concepts of what the company's business apps could end up looking like when optimized for Windows 8. The Dynamics team will be demonstrating these concept apps in Houston this week for the 10,000 or so expected Convergence attendees. These concept apps are Windows 8 HTML5 "Metro-style" (a k a WinRT-based) clients that connect to Dynamics ERP and CRM back-end services. Here are screen shots from a couple of these demos, supplied to me by Microsoft..."

Metro App Development

  • Windows 8 Metro Apps: The 8 Must-Know Tricks! Day 1 (Samidip Basu)

    • "You're at a chic coffee shop or on a plane. Just like everyone around you, you have a tablet. Watch a movie, play a game, do the social stuff. And then while everyone starts getting bored, you flip part of your tablet and out comes a thin keyboard. May be you are also carrying your Arch Touch mouse .. your thin tablet is now transformed into a decent dev machine that'll happily run Visual Studio for hours on battery. Non-developers get to use the desktop mode on Intel slates, thus bringing over all the productivity applications from a Windows 7 PC. All the while, the ‘Metro' side of things stays very touch-friendly and superbly delightful for content consumption..."

  • Metro: Creating an IndexedDbDataSource for WinJS (Stephen Walther)

    • "The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can create custom data sources which you can use with the controls in the WinJS library. In particular, I explain how you can create an IndexedDbDataSource which you can use to store and retrieve data from an IndexedDB database. If you want to skip ahead, and ignore all of the fascinating content in-between, I've included the complete code for the IndexedDbDataSource at the very bottom of this blog entry..."

  • Using the Windows 8 Simulator & VS 2012 to debug the IE10 touch events & your responsive design (David Rousset)

    • "I'm currently working around the touch events of IE10 and even if I'm lucky enough to have a Windows 8 tablet, I was looking for a simpler way to do basic tests on my classical laptop without switching to the tablet each time. While looking for that, I've discovered several tips & tricks that may help you debugging the IE10 touch events in your code without even using a touch device. Nice side effect: the same approach will also help you to test & debug your responsive web design!"

  • The taming of the Metro GridView (Diederik Krols)

    • "This article describes how to restyle the Metro GridView to host a single page app like the sample Weather and Finance apps. I'll show you how to get rid of the default disco effects of this control - like the swiping behavior and the pressed animation. For this article, I started with my own lightweight version of the weather app, but I got bored very soon. So I upgraded the app to a tribute to the iconic rock band CPeX, with some pictures, some overflowing RichTextBox controls with lyrics, and WebView controls revealing the band's web site and wikipedia page; there's even a YouTube video in it..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • MVVM Light Toolkit V4 RTM (Laurent Bugnion)

    • "This version supports Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, WPF 3.5 SP1, WPF4, Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.5, WinRT (Windows 8). Support for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 RC."

Free Training Materials

  • Windows 8 Camp in a Box, Release Preview Edition (Microsoft Download Center)

    • "This download includes the hands-on-labs, presentations, samples and resources from the Windows 8 camps. The Windows 8 camps are free training events for developers ramping up on Metro style app development. "