Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-18

posted on 17 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Designing the Windows 8 touch keyboard (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Starting with the earliest TabletPC enhancements to Windows, we have been working on "on-screen keyboards." With Windows 8, we started fresh and took a "first principles" approach to developing the touch keyboard. Given the amount of experience many of us have with touch keyboards for phones, and the myriad of touch devices we interact with these days, we set a very high bar for the quality of the experience and effectiveness of input with the new Windows 8 touch keyboard. In this post, Kip Knox, a member of the Windows User Experience program management team, details this work..."

Metro App Development

  • Roaming your app data (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "Windows 8 keeps users always connected. They can be connected to the internet, cloud services, and their other Windows 8 PCs. Your app can participate in this always connected ecosystem by taking advantage of roaming app data. In this post I tell you more about roaming app data, what it is, why it's important, and best of all how easy it is to implement in your app..."

  • Creating your first Windows 8 Metro Style Design Game (Lee Stott)

    • "After a great week at the Develop Conference, I wanted to share some great Windows 8 gaming guides and Tutorials from Dave Isbitski ... The following Tutorials and resources contain the following technologies: HTML5 Canvas, HTML5, Audio, XAML/C#, CSS3 Styling and Web Fonts, Implementing a Game Loop with JavaScript, Third Party Frameworks, Touch, Camera Access, Accelerometer, WinJS Controls..."

  • Windows 8 Metro: Win as one with search and share contracts (Andrea Boschin)

    • "... When you write an application, you know that it has a specific domain where it is focused and works in the best way. There are other things that are not specific to the domain and, also if they collaborate to the success, are better achieved by others. ... As an example, when you need to open a file on the filesystem, you use an operating system's api to ask for a dialog that is completely managed by the operating system and it returns to you the choosed file..."

  • Information about the Developer License for Windows 8 Metro style apps (Rachel Appel)

    • "Writing Metro Style Apps for Windows 8 requires that you have a valid Developer License for Windows 8. The Developer License is free, regardless of the edition of Visual Studio you are using. The license works with Windows 8 Metro style apps only, you do not need it to write ASP.NET sites or WinForms programs. ... Microsoft Windows Phone developers are accustomed to the notion of a developer license; however, other developers like ASP.NET or native Windows devs might not. Why you need a developer license for Metro style apps..."

  • Exploring Win8 Metro: The RichEditBox & FilePickers (Jesse Liberty)

    • "Win8 provides a number of controls in the XAML toolkit that are easy to use and that provide a great deal of flexibility and power. I'll be writing about some of these controls now and then, starting with some simple and easy to use controls that do a lot of work for you. The RichEdit box allows the user to open and view and edit a Rich Text document..."

  • Tips and tricks for C# Metro developers : Handling the keyboard events (David Catuhe)

    • "I have some users that ask me how can I handle the keyboard ? Should I add an event Handler on a top root grid? The response is no . The better solution is to use the KeyUp/KeyDown event of the CoreWindow which is able to catch all the keyboard strokes..."

  • Make e-mail address clickable in a Windows 8 metro app (Michiel Post)

    • "When creating an about page for your Windows 8 metro / WinRT application, you probably display your e-mail address so users can contact you. It's easy to make your e-mail adress clickable. Just place your text inside a button control and handle the button click..."

  • Upcoming SilverlightShow Webinar: Advanced Windows 8 Metro (Silverlight Show)

    • "We will be covering, among others, the following topics: periodic tiles and push notifications, a lot on data and services (including data binding, WCF, REST, Live SDK, oData...), local file IO, reusable components, background workers and much more! Join us for 2 hours of gathering deeper understanding of Windows 8! The level for this 2-part webinar session is 300." The first webinar is Today, July 18th.

  • What icon sizes are important for your Win RT app? (Mark Monster)

    • "The are quite a couple of icons that you can set, though not all of them are absolutely required. For the tile we have the following logo sizes. I also created the example of an app I'm working on..."

Office 2013

  • Office and the Cloud (Office Next)

    • "Editor's note: John Jendrezak, Partner Group Program Manager visits the Office Next blog today to discuss some of our efforts in aligning the client suites to the cloud and some of our new delivery options. In future posts we will discuss the other side of this relationship - our investments in cloud services that are designed to improve the productivity experience for both individuals and organizations. We'll also drill deeply into several of these areas with more detailed information during the preview period..."

  • Office 2013: Editions at a glance and FAQ (ZDNet)

    • "Summary: What's the difference between Office 2013 and Office 365? Which apps are in each edition? How do I install the preview? Get answers to these questions and more in this FAQ..."