Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-26

posted on 25 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Simplifying printing in Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Printing is one of the most common things we do with our PCs even as we read and work with more online resources. We set out to simplify and improve this common operation--working with partners across the ecosystem to deliver these improvements in Windows 8. This blog post was authored by Adrian Lannin, a lead program manager on the Printing team..."

Metro App Development

  • Announcing BUILD 2012 (Channel 9)

    • "In January we shared some thoughts on our approach to developer events, including a commitment to come back with more on our plans for an event this coming fall. Well, here it is: our next developer conference will be this fall, and it's (again) called BUILD. It will be held on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, from October 30th until November 2nd. Yes, that's right ... it's the week after Windows 8 becomes generally available worldwide. And in addition to Windows 8, we will have lots of other stuff to talk about, too: Windows Azure, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and much more..."

  • Windows 8: Making the case for Expression Blend (Jerry Nixon)

    • "One of the coolest parts of the XAML designer in Visual Studio 2012 is that it is the same code base as the designer in Expression Blend for XAML. That's right. Blend's designer used to be better, but now Visual Studio developers are first class, too. ... The Visual Studio 2010 XAML designer was pretty nice. But it had limits in functionality and stability that drove me to Blend. As lovely as this Dev 11 update is, I can't help but be concerned that Visual Studio developers who avoided Blend, have even less reason to try it! That's why I wrote this: Why use Expression Blend?..."

  • Share contract and custom data. Do you need a reference implementation for schema.org formats? (Andrei Marukovich)

    • "Windows 8 style apps can use contracts to interact with each other. For example Share contract allows sharing of various data between totally independent apps. As long as app follows Share target contract it can receive text, HTML, links, files, images and custom data. For source apps sharing data in the standard formats is pretty straight forward - DataPackage class provides corresponding functions SetText(), SetUri(), etc. All what you need is to call function and target app will get the data. Custom data is a different story..."

  • Example Metro app /WinRT: How to add more Segoe UI Symbol symbols as icons (Iris Classon)

    • Iris explains how to use the Character Map application to find and use the embedded symbols in the Segoe UI Symbols font in your Metro application.

Apps & Code to Look At

  • MetroGridHelper for WinRT, a helper to get the alignment right (Mark Monster)

    • "It's already more than a year ago that Jeff Wilcox wrote the MetroGridHelper for Windows Phone. I've been using it a lot since then. But we now have the option to build WinRT applications, sadly without the MetroGridHelper. Wait no more, I ported the code from Jeff and also modified it to fit the metro guidelines that exist for WinRT applications..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • ReSharper 7.0 is Released (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)

    • "Ladies and gentlemen, a fresh official ReSharper release has finally arrived! Download ReSharper 7.0, the new major version of the awesome Visual Studio productivity tool. ReSharper 7.0 is an important update for all .NET developers, bringing more ways to refactor, inspect, and generate code. Early MS technology adopters should also appreciate support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012, as well as support for Metro style application development for Windows 8..."

Internet Explorer 10

  • Pat's Application Compatibility Blog (Pat Altimore)

    • "For browsing, IE 10 provides a great touch experience with the Metro style browser. If you don't have touch enabled hardware available, here's a quick way to simulate touch behavior to test your site..."