Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-25

posted on 24 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Building Pie Chart for Windows 8 Metro (Mahmoud Medhat Moussa)

    • "I came to a point were I need to use a Pie chart for a Project if you tried to search online you will not find a free charting control so I decided to build one. there is a huge modification in .NET 4.5 framework specially when it come to Paths and drawing because of Different namespaces, Performance enhancement, etc... So I decided to build a charting library on my own and here I'll give you an initial start on build a Pie Chart..."

  • A WinRT behavior to mimic EventToCommand (Joost van Schaik)

    • "Whoever used the MVVMLight framework by Laurent Bugnion is familiar with EventToCommand... This utility enables triggers to fire commands on the ViewModel - or put differently, an enables event in the GUI to trigger a command in the viewmodel. Unfortunately, in WinRT there is no such thing as a trigger, so this method cannot be used, and MVVMLight for WinRT therefore does not include EventToCommand. ... but I had the feeling it could be done quite easily. In the afternoon, in the time between I came home and my wife came home from work wrote this behavior that basically does the same as EventToCommand..."

  • Windows 8 Dev Tip: Nullable<T> Dependency Properties and Binding (Dan Rigby)

    • "Let's say you're building a user control and one of your control's properties needs to be a three state boolean (true, false, null). No sweat, we'll just create a nullable boolean (bool?) dependency property... now lets piece it all together by adding a main page, binding our new user control to the page's datacontext, and creating a few radio buttons to change the value of the datacontext... let's fire up our new app and test it out! ... Wait, the null value works, but when you select true or false nothing changes. What gives? ..."

  • 30 questions about Windows 8 that I get asked all the time (Jerry Nixon)

    • "As a developer evangelist, I interact with a lot of developers. Many developers are just meeting Windows 8 for the very first time. Some developers have started to tinker. And, others are deep into their first application - on target for the store. The common thread between them are a set of recurring questions that I get over and over. I thought I would document a few of them..."

  • Get up to speed on Windows 8 in 6 weeks (Lee Stott)

    • "So its now the summer holidays, well its the perfect time to get skilled up for Windows 8, to do this you will need to be fully prepared. To confirm RTM of Windows 8 has been confirmed for August and General Release for Oct 2012. So to help you get prepared we have created a 6 week plan for you..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • WinRtBehaviors (CodePlex)

    • "Windows 8 Metro Style does not support Behaviors out of the box. As to why this is, one can only speculate. This project tries to fill the gap for people who really need behaviors to get cracking in XAML for Windows 8 Metro style..."

Free Training Materials

  • Webinar - Advanced Windows 8 Metro - Part 2 (Silverlight Show)

    • "This webinar picks up where the intro talks (see the recordings of earlier webinars on Windows 8) stopped, so expect coverage of topics you may have seen some content about or even none at all! In the first part of this webinar, Gill Cleeren discussed periodic tiles and push notifications, a lot on data and services (including data binding, WCF, REST, Live SDK, oData...), and much more! We welcome you to join part 2, when Gill will talk about localization, async, building WinRT reusable components and more..." This webinar is Today, July 25th.

Office 2013

  • The Social Enterprise (Office Next)

    • "Today Ben Wilde joins Office Next to discuss some of our investments in social for the Office Preview Release..."