Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-19

posted on 18 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Windows 8 will be available on... (Blogging Windows)

    • "...October 26th, 2012! That's right! Just a few minutes ago, Steven Sinofsky announced at Microsoft's annual sales meeting that customers will be able to get Windows 8 - whether in upgrade fashion or on a new PC - starting on October 26th. Earlier this month at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Tami Reller told attendees Windows 8 would be available in October. But now everyone has a specific date to mark on their calendars. It's on mine!"

  • Using your feedback to make Narrator work better with touch (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Shortly before we released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in February, we blogged about our work to make Windows 8 more accessible to people with disabilities. This included our work on Narrator to enable customers who are blind to use Windows 8 on touch screens. This work has continued to evolve in the Release Preview, and will also improve as we move toward the final release of Windows 8. This post details some of the work we have done to improve Narrator when using a touch-enabled PC. This post was authored by Doug Kirschner on our Accessibility team..."

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..."

  • Semantic Zoom only supports GridView and ListView? (Shiva Vitakula)

    • "Many people have been asking why semantic zoom is limited while using GridView and ListView. The answer is, it is not limited to GridView and ListView. These are the only 2 out of box controls that support semantic zoom. And these are the 2 controls the make the most sense for me.What makes GridView and ListView capable of supporting Semantic zoom? Both GridView & ListView inherit from ListViewBase.ListViewBase implements an interface called ISemanticZoomInformation..."

  • Windows 8 Dev Tip: Animating Attached Properties (Dan Rigby)

    • "When you're working with Metro Style apps, eventually you'll want to animate an attached property. A common example is changing which grid row or column an element is in when reacting to a layout change. Let's give it a try..."

  • WinRT/Metro App Q n' A: How do I get the screen resolution and scale? (Iris Classon)

    • "Following a discussion on the Metro/WinRT mailinglist I've decided to share a handy little code snippet. With different screen resolutions, aspect ratios and scaling you might need to display things differently, and maybe you would like to access the resolution and scale details in code/programmatically. Well, it's actually quite easy..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Enhancements in Visual Studio 2012 for Sorting Data across Relationships (Visual Studio LightSwitch Team Blog)

    • "Sorting data across relationships is often required when building applications within LightSwitch. For example, suppose you are building a LightSwitch application that attaches to the Category and Product tables from the Northwind database. You can probably imagine applications in which you would want to display products and have them sorted by their associated Category's CategoryName. Within this blog post I will show you how this can be done with Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 and how much easier it is to do with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012..."

  • Visual C# Breaking Changes in Visual Studio 2012 RC (MSDN)

    • "The following table lists changes in Visual C# in Visual Studio 2012 RC that might either prevent an application that was created in Visual C# 2010 from compiling or change its run-time behavior."

Office 2013

  • Using the new Office with touch (Office Next)

    • "Windows 8 provides a number of platform capabilities for enabling highly responsive touch support in applications, ranging from hardware accelerated graphics and improved touch targeting to the a new app platform that makes it easy to build touch-optimized Windows 8-style apps. The new Office takes advantage of these to deliver great new touch-based experiences on Windows 8. Clint Covington, a lead program manager for our User Experience team authored this post..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • How Exactly ReSharper 7 Supports Visual Studio 2012 (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)

    • "One of the larger efforts in ReSharper 7 was support for Visual Studio 2012, in terms of integration, enhancements of the Visual Studio experience, as well as new technologies such as WinRT. In this post we're going to go over some of these..."