Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-23

posted on 22 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Making money with your apps through the Windows Store (Windows Store for developers)

    • "Previously, we've discussed how Windows 8 is the single biggest platform opportunity available to developers. This blog post showcases how you can take advantage of this opportunity by diving into how pricing and payment works, as well as providing examples of the options you have for making money with your apps. Arik Cohen, Lead Program Manager for our Commerce and Licensing team, authored this post..."

  • Want To Build Win8/WinJS Apps? You Need To Understand Promises. (Derick Bailey)

    • "... I'm working with Christopher Bennage and the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group to build a Windows 8, WinJS, Metro-style app with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's a tremendously fun project, and I'm learning a lot - not only about Windows 8 and metro style apps, but also about raw ECMAScript-5 based development, with no shims or facades, no jQuery and no Backbone.js. And one of the most important things that I've learned about WinJS development so far, is that if you want to build apps for Windows 8 with HTML and JavaScript, you must have a solid understanding of asynchronous JavaScript development and promises..."

  • Creating a Zoomable ScrollViewer with ZoomSnapPoints in WinRT XAML (Filip Skakun)

    • "The Metro/WinRT XAML ScrollViewer by default allows to zoom in on its contents. That is because its ZoomMode property defaults to "Enabled". I think in most cases it is actually not the desired behavior and you might want to set ZoomMode to ZoomMode.Disabled. I do understand though that this makes the feature more discoverable and does not hurt much while potentially getting users familiar with the new paradigm of quickly scrolling by zooming that is also displayed in the SemanticZoom control..."

  • How to add a settings menu in a Windows 8 Metro-style app (Karl Ots)

    • "In Windows 8 development, there are some differences between the Javascript and XAML APIs. Some things are available in JS but not in XAML and vice versa. One example is the SettingsFlyout control. There is no SettingsFlyout control for creating a settings menu item in XAML, although that exists in JS. The de facto solution is to create your own custom page and show/dismiss it according to the settings charm events. As this is something that basically every Metro app (or "Windows 8 style application") has to include, it's fortunate that there's now a bit less tiresome way of doing this..."

  • Creating tiled backgrounds in Metro style XAML apps (Rob Fonseca-Ensor)

    • "Textures can make your application beautiful. ... So how do you program your application to repeat this image across a surface? In HTML, you can use the css style "background-repeat: repeat" to tile an image across your webpage. In WPF, you can set up the TileBrush properties on an ImageBrush to tile an image across your application. But in Silverlight, Silverlight for Windows Phone, or Metro style XAML applications, you're out of luck. ... There was no way I was going to convert my application into a JavaScript & HTML app, so I set out to create a control that would look just like a WPF tiled brush..."

  • A JavaScript Library for Everything (Jeremy Foster)

    • "Windows 8 is one of those environments that's just fun and expressive to develop in. So is JavaScript. The convergence of the two is just rockin'. One of the great things about JavaScript is the enormous amount of code that other people have already written and put up on the web for your consumption. Do you want to wrap local storage (store.js), detect faces (liuliu), implement lightweight pubsub (minpubsub), or load JavaScript asynchronously (include.js)? You can do it by simply including a library in your Windows 8 project..."

  • Example WinRT/Metro App: How to edit default template in Visual Studio 2012 and Blend (Iris Classon)

    • "Based on a question I answered on Stackoverflow I've decided to just quickly show how you can generate the default template for a control, so you then can change it as you please. Let's face it, the default templates will only take you so far, you will want to edit that purple selected item color at some point, or like me- remove all selection animations and just use the panel to simply display data as a collection. Here is two ways to generate the template in Visual Studio 2012..."

  • The Unsung Story of the Windows 8 Desktop (Jeremy Likness)

    • "When developers first got their hands on the Windows 8 Developer Preview, I heard some comment that it was Windows 7 with some touch-friendly menus added in Metro. While most now know that is far from the case, there is a heavy focus on the Metro-style features and I think it is easy to miss the long list of features that are available in Windows 8 on the desktop. To address this, I put together a talk called "Windows 8: A Tale of Two Stacks" and covered dozens of features that have been added for both Windows 8 and Metro..."

  • A Deep Dive in Expression Blend for Windows 8 Metro Apps-Channel 9 Video (Mahmoud Medhat Moussa)

    • "A Must See View for Learning to Design Metro Style Apps with Blend for Visual Studio..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 (CodePlex)

    • "This toolkit has all the tools to make it easy to develop a Windows Azure service and deploy it to your users. In addition to documentation, this toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for a sample Metro style app and a Windows Azure cloud project. This tool is designed to accelerate development so that developers can start enabling Windows 8 features, such as notifications, for their app with minimal time and experience. Use this toolkit to start building and customizing your own service to deliver rich Metro style apps..."

Internet Explorer 10

  • New Blob Constructor in IE10 (IEBlog)

    • "IE10 in Windows 8 Release Preview adds support for a Blob constructor. We earlier wrote about and demonstrated IE10's support for a BlobBuilder interface, an in-progress interface in the File API: Writer W3C Working Draft. This interface enables developers to work with files on the client PC. Recently, the W3C working group deprecated the BlobBuilder interface in favor of a new Blob constructor. This post explains the differences between the two..."

Office 2013

  • The new Office Web Apps (Office Next)

    • "On Monday, we unveiled the new Office. On Tuesday, we shared more details on Office and the Cloud and how we give you the flexibility of the browser with the power and responsiveness of rich clients. Today we dig deeper into the capabilities and technology behind the new Office Web Apps, which are available on SkyDrive and Office 365 Preview. The Office Web Apps extend your Office experience to the web allowing you to access, edit, and share your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents in a web browser. Mike Morton, Group Program Manager for Office Web Applications joins the blog to explain..."

Other

  • Entity Framework Magic Unicorn (and much more!) is now open source with take backs (Scott Hanselman)

    • "Almost exactly two years from the day we announced Entity Framework "Magic Unicorn Edition" and just a few months after open sourcing of ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, and Razor we're happy to announce we will release the source code for the Entity Framework under an open source license as well! This is cool for a number of reasons..."