Windows App Developer Links - 2012-07-30

posted on 29 Jul 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Working with GridView Control in WinRT App (Sergey Barskiy)

    • "As I am continuing to learn WinRT and its component, I spent sometime learning new native controls that are available for use in Metro style applications designed for Windows 8. One of those controls is GridView. This control can be easily visualized by looking at Windows 8 start screen. You see groups of tiles, scrollable horizontally. This is what this control is all about: presenting a list of items in a horizontally scrollable container, which can be further grouped. In the case of grouping, the control essentially just deals with list of lists..."

  • Transforming SVG graphics to XAML Metro Icons (Diederik Krols)

    • "This short article shows how to pimp your Windows 8 Metro apps with native XAML icons that are created from W3C Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG graphics are XML documents, and hence should be easily translatable into an other XML schema, such as XPS (the technology formerly known as ... Metro). Just like Metro XAML, XPS is a subset of XAML. Unfortunately its full object model is not implemented in Silverlight or Metro. In Windows, since the-OS-that-should-not-be-named, XPS is also used as print spooler format. This means that you don't even have to write an XSLT transformation to translate SVG to XAML: let the printer driver do the heavy lifting..."

  • Tips and Tricks for C# Metro developer: How to find a XAML control by its name (David Catuhe)

    • "Today, I would like to share with you a bunch of code that is able to find the first control with a given name. With this code, you do not have to bother with XAML namespace (like with FindControl) and it will go through the entire hierarchy for you. I use it in WorldMonger to display tutorials in top of given controls..."

  • Where are my async unit tests? (Nigel Sampson)

    • "I love the new unit test UI in Visual Studio 2012, especially the support for asynchronous unit tests. However simply adding the async keyword isn't quite enough, Visual Studio won't detect unit tests with the method signature "public async void". ... For Visual Studio to detect asynchronous unit tests they need to return System.Threading.Tasks.Task..."

Apps & Code to Look At

Internet Explorer 10

  • Web Performance APIs Rapidly Become W3C Candidate Recommendations (IEBlog)

    • "We're pleased to share that three new W3C Web Performance Working Group specifications moved to W3C Candidate Recommendations. Accurately measuring the performance characteristics of Web applications is critical to making the Web faster. In addition, developers need the ability to effectively use the underlying hardware to improve the performance of their applications. Over the last two years, companies including Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Intel, and Facebook have been working toward these goals through the working group. This is a great example of what's possible when the industry and community come together through the W3C..."