Windows App Developer Links - 2012-08-02

posted on 01 Aug 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Windows 8 has reached the RTM milestone (Blogging Windows)

    • "Today, I am excited to announce that Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing (RTM)! This means we've completed the product development and testing of the product and have started handing off the final code to our OEM partners. They can now begin preparing new Windows 8 PCs and devices they'll introduce starting with General Availability..."

  • What Windows 8 RTM Means for Businesses (Windows for your Business Blog)

    • "A little more than a year ago, the world first got a close look at Windows reimagined. And since then, my team and I have been meeting with customers all over the world about how Windows 8 is Enterprise ready by design and how it will work for their business. It's been an exciting journey to Windows 8, and today we are one step closer to the finish line with Windows 8 being released to manufacturing (RTM). The RTM milestone of Windows 8 means that the operating system is ready for market and our OEM and ODM partners can finish building and refining their products in preparation for Windows 8 general availability, slated for Friday, October 26, 2012. And while the RTM milestone is important for OEMs and ODMs, it also signals to our customers, partners and developers that they will be getting their hands on Windows 8 Enterprise edition soon..."

  • Releasing Windows 8 - August 1, 2012 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 8 project. The Windows 8 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we started releasing Windows 8 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners. This means our next milestone will be the availability of exciting new models of PCs loaded with Windows 8 and online availability of Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. Back when we first demonstrated Windows 8 in May 2011, we described it as "reimagining Windows, from the chipset to the experience," and that is what Windows 8 (and Windows RT) represents for both Microsoft and partners. The collective work: from the silicon, to the user experience, to new apps, has been an incredibly collaborative effort. Together we are bringing to customers a new PC experience that readies Windows PCs for a new world of scenarios and experiences, while also preserving an industry-wide 25-year investment in Windows software..."

Metro App Development

  • RTM Windows Store is now open for paid apps, company accounts (Windows Store for developers)

    • "Today marks an important milestone for the Windows Store as we move from preview toward the general availability of Windows 8. We're again expanding our market coverage, committed as ever to creating a developer opportunity of unprecedented scale. We're opening the Store up for company registrations and are now accepting paid apps. Finally, we've advanced the Store design in response to Release Preview feedback. Ted Dworkin, Partner Program Manager for the Store, authored this post..."

  • The Top 10 Windows 8 Secrets of App Success (Chris Bowen)

    • "Making $ on Windows 8: The First Mover Advantage. The upcoming release of Windows 8 offers developers a huge opportunity. How huge? The Windows Store Blog sums it up well: "With more than 630 million licenses sold to date, across 200+ countries and regions around the world, Windows has an unrivaled global reach. Combined with the flexibility of monetization options that the Store provides, Windows 8 represents the single biggest developer opportunity for any platform." So, how can you join in?..."

  • Taking your HTML controls into Windows 8 Metro (Susan Ibach )

    • "How do you take the HTML you know and love and give it a Metro look and feel for Windows 8 apps? The Windows 8 team put up an interesting blog post this week about how you take existing HTML controls and style them to look metro. You can read the full blog post here, but I'll highlight a few of the key points to get you started..."

  • Windows 8, XNA and MonoGame - Part 1, Overview (Bob Familiar)

    • "Casual game developers have been using XNA since 2004 to easily create games for Windows, XBox and most recently Windows Phone. XNA is a .NET framework for game development providing a content pipeline and game asset load functionality, animation, math, sound and user input tracking via gamepad, mouse, keyboard and touch with game logic organized in a straightforward game loop architecture. ... Using the XNA Framework is not a choice for building a Metro Style App. Official Microsoft guidance on game development is documented here. The recommended way to build highly immersive games on Windows 8 is to use HTML5/JS, XAML/C#, XAML/VB or C++ and DirectX, all great choices. But if you have been developing with XNA and have an existing code base, your only option it would seem is running as a desktop app. This is where MonoGame comes in..."

  • Showing the AppBar for HTML Metro Applications in Design Mode using Blend for Visual Studio 2012 (Michael Crump)

    • "Showing the AppBar in XAML Metro Applications requires no special tips or tricks, just place the code on your page and open it in Blend and you will see the AppBar: ... As you can see below, it just works. HTML Metro Application on the other hand doesn't have this luxury, instead you have to enabled it..."

  • Windows Notification service in Metro style applications (The Code Project)

    • "The Windows Push Notification Service is used to enable a developer to send toast, tile and badge. WNS provides a mechanism to deliver new updates to the user. Before we learn Windows Push Notification I would like to describe the Package.appmanifest file and its settings. This file is automatically created when you create a new Metro style project. This is an XML file that can contain the project configuration settings. Let's have a quick look at all these settings which are in the Package.appmanifest file..."

  • Filtering and Grouping ListView and GridView on Windows 8 (Jared Bienz)

    • "One of the questions I recently answered on Stack Overflow was how to filter and group data in ListView and GridView. Filtering and grouping has traditionally be done with CollectionViewSource. Unfortunately, CollectionViewSource no longer has the Filter event or the GroupDescriptions property. It may seem like filtering and grouping are unsupported, but both can still be achieved using LINQ. In your Xaml, add a CollectionViewSource in the Resources section of your page. Make sure IsSourceGrouped is set to true..."

  • Windows 8 and HTML Part 2: 3rd Party Frameworks (Jeff Brand)

    • "In this installment, I take a VERY quick look at how you can leverage 3rd party JavaScript frameworks like jQuery in your Windows 8 Metro-style applications. The biggest change when working with 3rd party frameworks (3PFs) is that you must copy the script files for the framework to the project. This is for two reasons. First, your app has to run when it is not connected to the internet, so you need those files local. Second, external content, even if it is available, runs in a different security context than local code. That difference in security context can cause problems with some 3PFs. If you are working with the project we started in Part 1, you can just add the 3PFs to the js folder, or anywhere else, for that matter..."

  • Windows 8 Metro app: Sending an email. (Compared to Windows Phone 7's EmailComposeTask) (Mikael Koskinen)

    • "In a Windows Phone 7 app, sending an email requires an instance of EmailComposeTask. EmailComposeTask is really easy to use and self-explanatory: ... In Windows 8 Metro app, there's no EmailComposeTask. Instead, you create a "mailto" -uri and launch it: ... But when compared to an EmailComposeTask, this only fills the "To" -part, but what about the 'Subject' and 'Body'? Well, the mailto-syntax allows you to define these as query parameters. For example, here's an example of defining the "subject", "body" and "to" -fields from code. The uri is automatically escaped by the platform..."

  • Creating a Windows 8 Metro App Package (Geoff Webber-Cross)

    • "The following procedure shows how to create a Windows 8 Metro App Package. The next article will be the more complicated procedure to install it!..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Complete! (Somasegar's blog)

    • "Today, the Windows and Windows Server teams announced that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have been released to manufacturing. In keeping with our goal of delivering great tools on the same cadence as our platforms, I'm thrilled to announce that we have completed final builds of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5. This has been an exciting road for all of us involved in these projects, and we're glad to be able to deliver these to our customers. For MSDN Subscribers, the bits will be available for download on August 15th. Visual Studio Professional, Premium, Test Professional, and Ultimate with MSDN Subscribers can also sign up for a free, one year developer account for Windows Store today, with Windows Phone developer accounts coming soon..."