Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-12

posted on 11 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Creating Metro style apps that stand out from the crowd (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "When you submit your app into the Store, there will no doubt be other apps in your category that will compete for people's attention. Being able to crisply showcase the differentiation points in your offerings and staying focused on delivering the core scenarios that you are best at are crucial to a successful Metro style app that will stand out from the crowd. Windows 8 provides a set of design patterns, common controls, and built-in platform functionalities such as contracts that can help you focus on what you are best at..."

  • What Windows 8 Developers Should Know About The Cloud (Bruno Terkaly)

    • "Successful Application = Windows 8 + Cloud. 1. Client-side developers do need to embrace the cloud. The increasing popularity of connected devices like tablet computers and smartphones, is having a direct effect on the adoption rate of personal cloud services. You can expect both connected devices and cloud services to grow together. 2..."

  • Windows 8 - Overriding Metro app resources (Nigel Sampson)

    • "Once you've installed Visual Studio and explored the default templates one of the first things you'll want to do from a design point of view is changing the application brush resources. Usually this will be to alter the teal or purple selection colour (depending if you're using a Dark or Light theme) on most of the controls. The most common answer to this problem is re-template your control referring to your custom colours. The simpler approach we've used at Marker Metro is the following..."

  • Adventures in Windows 8: Writing WinRT Components (Frank La Vigne)

    • "Earlier today, I opined the finer points of JavaScript/HTML development after earlier on the same day pointed out something that couldn't be done in JavaScript and I added a WinRT component written in C#. This is one of the best parts of Metro style app development: WinRT components. Pay attention closely to this graph, it will come up again and again. In fact, you may want to save this image, print this out, and hang it up next to your computer. It's a great reminder of the versatility and ingenuity of the Windows 8 platform. Plus, it'll be handy to have when some chump tells you that "X is better than Y" for building Metro style apps or some such other nonsense..."

Apps & Code to Look At

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • What's New Coming in ReSharper 7.0 (JetBrains)

    • "This page describes features available in ReSharper 7.0 Beta. The new version provides support for Visual Studio 2012 and WinRT development, new refactorings and code hierarchy views, and more."

  • Getting started with Telerik RadControls for Metro - diving into the Examples Application (Georgi Atanasov)

    • "We are proud to announce the first publicly available BETA release of the world's first commercial toolkit for Windows 8 Metro applications - our RadControls for Metro suite. We have worked hard during the past few months in order to prepare first-class components, designed and built from the ground-up for the Microsoft's new platform for building immersive applications - the Windows Runtime. As with every Telerik product line, we have also prepared a complete application (QSF - Quick Start Framework) that demos various aspects of our controls and may be used as an entry point for getting familiar with the controls. In this post I will show you different aspects of the application and how to get the maximum out of it..."

Books

  • Introduction to Windows 8 Metro Part 1: Ebook (Andrea Boschin)

    • "In this first part (2 more parts expected to be released, following the development of the series) Andrea introduces the basic concepts of Windows 8 development, and covers developing your first application, the application life-cycle, the new metro controls and more. "