Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-17

posted on 16 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 2012

  • Improved Toolbox Performance Delivers Highly Responsive Visual Studio 2012 (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "As mentioned in the previous performance post on Typing and Editing we would follow with a post on the improvements to Visual Studio 2012 from enhancements in the Toolbox. I would like to introduce Duke Kamstra and Chuck England from two teams in Visual Studio to describe to you the work done to improve responsiveness via the Toolbox."

  • New Features Explained - LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 (Beth Massi)

    • "The team has been cranking out a lot of great content over on the LightSwitch Team blog and a lot of that stuff is related to all the new features in Visual Studio 2012. ... With all the (well deserved) hype over the HTML Client Preview lately, I thought it would be helpful to bring some focus back and tally the list of articles on the major new features that are ready to ship that are available in Visual Studio 2012. Just in case you missed them..."

Metro App Development

  • Windows 8 Metro Apps: The 8 Must-Know Tricks! Day 2 (Samidip Basu)

    • "This is Day # 2 in the Windows 8 development article series on common tips & tricks towards developing real-world Metro apps. Over the next several weeks, you'll see 8 articles talk about some must-do things for Windows 8 Metro app developers. Simple & to the point, with some code examples on XAML/C# stack. ... Day 2: Layout, Navigation & Visual States..."

  • Positioning Popup Menus in Windows 8 (Nigel Sampson)

    • "Often when building Windows 8 apps you'll want to provide a menu of options from the app bar, this may be a list of different ways to sort or filter the data. For these simple menus WinRT provides the PopupMenu control (for more complicated popup user interfaces I recommend the Flyout control from the Callisto library), these menus are very easy to create by creating UI Commands and appending them to the menus Commands collection..."

  • Drag and Drop within a grouped grid view (Shiva Vitakula)

    • "I was working on my app and I had to implement functionality to Drag and Drop items between different groups of a Group Grid View. Out of box reordering (drag and drop) doesn't seem to work with Grouped Grid Views. So I implemented my own. This is very crude solution, but meets my requirements..."

  • Windows 8 Metro - Let ListViewBase drive the underlying collection (Rohit Sharma)

    • "One new feature in ListView and GridView for Win8 Metro app, is that these control can now request the underlying source collection to incrementally add more items as required i.e. the collection need not be pre-cached and fully-loaded in advance, the collection can be populated on the fly (on-demand) as user scrolls through it (lazy loading). The two main requirements are (1) the collection should implement ISupportIncrementalLoading interface (2) the control (listview/gridview) is in virtualization mode (such as using VirtualizingStackPanel)..."

  • Adventures in Windows 8: UX Considerations When Migrating from Windows Phone 7 (Frank La Vigne)

    • "For my first real Windows Metro style app, I decided to port my Area Code Look Up app from the phone over to Windows Metro. The word "port" is somewhat misleading: there's not really a lot of code sharing: the phone version is Silverlight and the Metro version is JavaScript. Yes, JavaScript..."

  • Adding an Application Bar to a Windows 8 Metro Style App using HTML and JavaScript (Dave Isbitski)

    • "This short screencast will show you how to add an Application Bar to your own Windows 8 Metro Style App using HTML and JavaScript. We do this in a fun, immersive way utilizing the free MetroGameKit (http://metrogamekit.codeplex.com)..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • Metro oAuth Utils (CodePlex)

    • "A bunch of libraries that enable functionality in various OAuth secured services (using a common framework) with compatibility for both Win8 Metro/WinRT & WP7. The biggest difference between this project and others is that the oAuth libraries were built from scratch to be used with Win8 Metro/WinRT and also utilizes the Async CTP to bring compatibility of this code to Windows Phone. It uses specific features of WinRT like the WebAuthenticationBroker to simplify the process of authenticating the user (and simplifying both the libraries' code and your code)..."

  • MetroIoc - a simple WinRT IoC container (CodePlex)

    • "A WinRT port of the MicroIoc container. MetroIoc is a native WinRT Inversion of Control container, for use in Metro style app..."

Other

  • First look: Microsoft Office 2013 (cnet)

    • "Microsoft today revealed the next important brick in its Windows 8 castle, the latest version of its Office suite of productivity tools. Technically the 15th version of the software, collectively, the new tools will be known as Office 2013 and will deliver most of what users have come to rely on, with a smattering of the new Windows 8 flavour. In fact, Microsoft has doubled the size of the design team working on the Office product, up to 170 designers, to give this latest version an experience that users can become emotionally involved with..."