Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-16

posted on 15 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 2012

  • New Revision of the July 2012 Update for Visual Studio 2012 RC (Heath Stewart)

    • "We have released a new revision of the July 2012 Update for VS2012 RC. This update replaces - or supersedes - the previous update, which means the download link is the same. We have retained the previous packages that VSUpdate installs - or chains - to support customers who may still require source packages when repairing Visual Studio 2012 RC or uninstalling VSUpdate RC..."

Metro App Development

  • Launching Windows Store from your Metro style app (Alan Mendelevich)

    • "Suppose you wanted to include a page in your new shiny Windows 8 Metro app listing your other apps and when a user taps on an app in the list he/she will be immediately transferred into Windows Store to give you more money (or at least boost your rankings). How do you do that?..."

  • Grid View Similar to People app's contacts page (Shiva Vitakula)

    • "Like everyone else I recently started learning to make Metro apps using C#. The best way to learn is by practice. People have been asking (in the forums) about how to make a Grid View similar to the People app. I decided to take a shot at it. Below blog post documents my attempt to create a Grid View similar to that of People App..."

  • Win 8-Some Things Are Just Too Easy (Jesse Liberty)

    • "Okay, like everyone else I know, I'm writing a book on Win 8. Actually, two books. The first, which will be very short, will be on XMAL from absolute scratch for Win 8 (not the title!) and the second is Programming Windows 8 with XAML and C# by APress. The first book is forcing me to go back and look at XAML through novice eyes, which is a great exercise in and of itself..."

  • Metro, Authentication, and the ASP.NET Web API (Stephen Walther)

    • "Imagine that you want to create a Metro style app written with JavaScript and you want to communicate with a remote web service. For example, you are creating a movie app which retrieves a list of movies from a movies service. In this situation, how do you authenticate your Metro app and the Metro user so not just anyone can call the movies service? How can you identify the user making the request so you can return user specific data from the service?..."

  • How to open Internet Explorer by code in a Metro style application (Matteo Pagani)

    • "Recently I've worked on a Windows 8 application to promote my blog: people can use it to read my posts within the application and to be notified (using both toast and tile notifications) every time a new post is published. The application uses a web view to display the detail of a post: the problem came when I had to manage the snapped view, since there isn't enough space on screen to display a web view..."

  • Playing a embedded media file (mp3) in WinRT (not via Xaml) (Derik Whittaker)

    • "When building WinRT applications it is going to be pretty common to want to play some sort of embedded audio file. It may also be common to want to play this file but via a ViewModel (or simply not in a view). In this post we are going to take a quick look at how to play an MP3 file by using the MediaElement control, but we will NOT be doing this via XAML, we will be doing via straight up code. The reason I am not using XAML here is because i don't want to limit the places or times I can play audio, also I want to trigger the playing of the file via my ViewModel..."

  • Argument Exception when Working with Secondary Tiles in WinRT (C#) (Derik Whittaker)

    • "If you are attempting to work with or create secondary tiles and you are getting the following exception you may want to check your title id. "System.ArgumentException: The parameter is incorrect." When trying to do a SecondaryTile.Exists(tileId) with the value as seen in the picture below..."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Announcing the MetroGameKit - a free, sample, starter project for Windows 8 Casual Games using HTML5 and JavaScript (Dave Isbitski)

    • "During the past couple of months I've been hacking around in the world of HTML5 Canvas and casual gaming. The community that has formed up around HTML5 Gaming in particular is awesome and I am continually impressed by what I've seen. Not to mention I'm a big retro gaming fan - 8 bits anyone? With that in mind I wanted to contribute back to the community if I could. I figured the best way I could do that was to take the experience I have writing Windows 8 Metro Style Apps and combine them with the world of HTML5 Canvas based gaming..."

  • Generic Object Storage Helper for WinRT (CodePlex)

    • "ObjectStorageHelper is a Generic class that simplifies storage of data in WinRT applications while still maintaining the async principles of Metro-style apps..."