Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-27

posted on 26 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Using HTML controls to create great Metro style apps (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "With Windows 8, you can use HTML to build Metro style apps. What you might not realize is that by using HTML controls directly, you automatically get the new Windows 8 experience. We have done work in HTML so that you can build industrial strength apps that have touch capability while still maintaining the great flexibility of using HTML. We want you to quickly and efficiently build apps that shine. In particular, we want you to continue to take advantage of common HTML controls like <button> so that you can create great Windows 8 experiences with your existing expertise. Windows 8 enables this with new implementations of the standard HTML controls that have Windows 8 experiences built into them..."

  • Drawing / Inking API in WinRT (C#) - I (Can Bilgin)

    • "If you are planning to develop an application that is going to have the drawing capability, one of the first namespaces to resort to in WinRT is the Inking namespace. ... In this article, we will be talking about different methodologies for rendering the pen input on the Canvas element on Metro application..."

  • Designing Metro Style Line of Business Apps (Channel 9)

    • "In this episode, Robert reviews a Windows 8 app he built. This line of business app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports, and for managers to view and approve or reject them. Robert is joined by Nadine Fox of Macadamian, the design firm that helped create the app's user interface. Robert and Nadine cover a variety of topics, including navigation patterns, the use of app bars (including what buttons go where on the app bar), modal vs non modal data entry screens, notifications, and more..."

  • A Quick Note On Pub-Sub / Event Aggregators In WinJS/WinRT (Derick Bailey)

    • "By now you know that I'm a fan of pub-sub / event aggregators, whether it's .NET / Winforms or Backbone or whatever. For the last 3 weeks working on this WinJS / WinRT app with the Microsoft P&P group, I've had this thought that I want to do the same thing in WinJS / WinRT apps. Only I couldn't figure out how. @Bennage and I had several discussions on this and decided to look in to it later. Well today was "later" apparently, and thanks to the Chris Tavares I found these wonderful little nuggets of awesome..."

  • [Windows 8] How to get the user's current culture? (Thomas LEBRUN)

    • "In .NET application, to retrieve the user's current culture is pretty simple using the CultureInfo class. But performing the same thing, in particular using Javascript, is a bit more complex. So here is a quick code sample to perform this task..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • How Visual Studio 2012 Avoids Prompts for Source (Heath Stewart)

    • "Requiring source packages during installation, repairs, and even uninstall are common occurrences for some customers. The core issue is that Windows Installer needs the source location of the package and its files to install - and can't find them automatically - when attempting to restore the machine to the state it should be in (according to that package and any patches applied to it)..."

  • Writing loggers for command line test runner vstest.console.exe (Vikram Agrawal)

    • "Command line test runner for VS 2012 comes with a parameter /logger where user can specify logger to be used. Two loggers shipped with VS are Console and Trx. Console logger is default logger that prints output of test execution to console window. Trx logger is can be used to generate trx file for test run (/logger:trx). Here I am describing how to write a custom logger that can be used with vstest.console.exe..."

Office 2013

  • Reading in the new Office (Office Next)

    • "When Word is described as a word processing application, most people think of it as an incredibly powerful tool for writing documents. And that's true. But once those documents are written and shared, they're read (usually by many more people than were responsible for writing it). In fact, from our user data we know that nearly two-thirds of user sessions in Word contain no editing at all - the only things that happen once the document is opened are scrolling and zooming changes as the user reads and processes the content. With this information in mind, the Word engineering team wanted to focus on creating a refreshed, modern reading experience for the new Word; one that optimized for the times when the user is focused on consuming, not creating, content..."