Windows App Developer Links - 2012-08-17

posted on 17 Aug 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Windows 8 Evaluation Copy (Mike Taulty)

    • "Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you'll know that Windows 8 has RTM'd and is available for download via MSDN. If you're not an MSDN subscriber but you have been using Windows 8 to develop applications then you might well want to continue to do that on an RTM version of the OS and you can do that if you go and download the evaluation copy..."

  • Preparing for Windows 8 RTM with a System Image backup (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "... before you go haring off to upgrade your machine that's been running the Release Preview, you may want to back up your current install on the off chance you run into a snag, or find that you need a file that you deleted along the way. A great way to do this is to create a System Image of your machine, and save it to an external hard drive. If needed, you can then restore this system image and be right back where you started. As a rule, I create a new system image any time I'm planning to upgrade a machine, either with new OS, or some new piece of hardware..."

  • Follow-up On Backups: Mounting a System Image (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "Yesterday, I posted about my practice of using the built in system image creation tools in Windows 7 and Windows 8 to create a backup of my system whenever I'm getting ready to upgrade. Now, if something goes tragically wrong, I can just boot to a system repair disk, and restore the image, and I'm back to where I started. But let's suppose the install goes fine, but I find that there's a file I need to get to from my backup, but I don't want to restore the entire backup, just get that file. The good news is that you can do this easily..."

  • Quick Tip: Activating your Windows 8 Installation (Jeremy Likness)

    • "Like many of you reading this, I was eager to jump online and download my copy of Windows 8 when it became available to developers yesterday. I pulled down the Windows 8 Enterprise SKU and installed it on my Samsung Series 7 Slate. The install went quickly - I was up and running in about 10 minutes - but I kept getting a nagging message to activate. It had never prompted me for the product key..."

  • Data Binding In Windows 8. Part 3-Element Binding (Jesse Liberty)

    • "In my previous post, I discussed the three modes of DataBinding for Windows 8. Today we'll take a brief look at binding not to data, but rather binding one UI element to the value of another. In this example, we'll bind the IsActive property of the ProgressRing to the IsChecked property's value in a CheckBox..."

  • Windows 8 and HTML Part 5: Fetch Data with WinJS (Jeff Brand)

    • "Continuing with Part 4 of building WinRT applications with HTML and JavaScript. ... Finally, we will start to get some data and begin building our application. Based on Part 4, the logical place to start will be in home.js..."

  • Loading Image from WCF Service Dynamically Metro Apps (Mahmoud Medhat Moussa)

    • "I found it really hard to solve this problem in Windows 8 when you want to Load Images Dynamically from Server Side using WCF to your Metro App since most of code snippets avaiable online will not work with Metro Apps. Basically here is the solution answer for you use the following snippets will solve your problem..."

  • Helpful Notes on SemanticZoom (Jared Bienz)

    • "A partner was recently having difficulties getting SemanticZoom to display the data he wanted. I realized quickly that there was a misunderstanding about how the control works. Here are the notes I shared with him that helped him get back on track..."

  • Using Accelerometer in Windows 8* Metro Style App and a Case Study of Tap Detection (Sushu Zhang)

    • "... This article covers the use of accelerometers in Windows 8* Metro style applications and a case study on how to use accelerometers to detect tapping on the edges of a tablet. In addition, the case study highlights how to detect the direction of taps that result in slight device movement."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • Web Essentials 2012 released (Mads Kristensen)

    • "Today is a big day for all ASP.NET web developers. Both Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 is being released to MSDN subscribers. It is also the day that the first version of Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2012 is being released, or simply Web Essentials 2012..."

  • Live SDK v5.2 (Microsoft Download Center)

    • "The Live SDK provides a set of controls and APIs that enable applications to integrate single sign-on (SSO) using Microsoft Account and to access data in SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Messenger. The Live SDK enables access to users' identity profile info and allows your apps to..."

Internet Explorer 10

  • Full-page Animations Using CSS (IEBlog)

    • "Internet Explorer 9 introduced support for CSS 2D Transforms. Internet Explorer 10 Developer Preview added support for CSS 3D Transforms and CSS Animations. By tapping the power of your GPU and running asynchronously from regular JavaScript, these IE10 features provide a more performant and flexible alternative to traditional script-based animations for Web content..."

Other

  • Reactive Extensions v2.0 has arrived! (Reactive Extensions Team Blog)

    • "Today, we're extremely pleased to announce the availability of Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) v2.0 RTM, aligned with the availability of Visual Studio 2012 RTM and Windows 8 RTM for MSDN subscribers. This is a major milestone for the Rx project and we hope you'll love what you see!..."