Windows App Developer Links - 2012-08-21

posted on 20 Aug 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Windows Upgrade Offer Registration Now Available (Blogging Windows)

    • "Today, registration is officially open for the Windows Upgrade Offer we announced in May. If you purchase or have purchased an eligible Windows 7 PC anytime between June 2, 2012 and January 31, 2013 you will be able to purchase an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for only $14.99 (U.S.) which will be redeemable when Windows 8 is generally available on October 26th..."

Windows 8 App Development

  • Testing Windows 8 apps using Visual Studio 2012 (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "As we continue to innovate on the operating system platform with Windows 8, we also enhanced the toolset available in Visual Studio to increase your productivity in testing your Windows 8 apps. Ensuring a top notch quality of your app in this new modern OS environment through thoughtful design and testing will help increase the success of your app. ... In this post, we explore a few capabilities in Visual Studio 2012 that will make the testing and verification of your app easier..."

  • WinRT app guide: Step 1: The idea (Iris Classon)

    • "Let me introduce to you the WinRT/Metro app we will be making in the next few months! I spent a lot of time and made a list with about 20 different ideas, and chose one that is very close to my heart, is fairly easy to make,- and one that can be ‘pimped' up later. The 1.0 version will be basic but functional. The app we will be making is called MIH!SP - Make It Happen! Study Planner..."

  • Jumping in feet first: Setup, Resources and Fundamentals (Adam Kinney)

    • "As the first log item, I'm going to focus on setup and initial concepts. Here I've listed a few topics worth looking into before beginning or during the initial stages of development. Get the goods..."

  • Using SVG with Windows 8 HTML/JavaScript apps (Jeff Brand)

    • "A common scenario when building a touch interface is having a particular UI element that you want to scale seamlessly between different screen sizes. This is different than having the layout scale. When scaling a layout, you make sure that content appears in roughly the same place, or in an optimized layout for a given screen real estate. What I am talking about here is you have a particular interactive element that needs to scale according to screen size. If you have a simple need, like scaling a logo, you can find examples of how to do that here..."

  • Windows 8 and HTML Part 6: Displaying Data with WinJS ListView (Jeff Brand)

    • "Continuing with Part 6 of building WinRT applications with HTML and JavaScript. ... In all honesty, it is easier to watch the video than for me to try and describe in text what I do in this installment. :)..."

  • Side Scrolling (Jeremy Foster)

    • "If you drop a ListView into your HTML page and fill it with data that fills up your page and overflows, what happens to the overflow? The answer is that it gets cut off by the right side of the screen and thus hints to the user to swipe to scroll the rest of the content into view. Easy. But what if you aren't using a ListView, or what if you have some content that you want to show next to your ListView and you want them to both pan together when the user swipes? Well, I'm going to tell you..."

  • WinRT/Xaml/AKA Metro DataTemplate selection based on Data Types (Aaron C)

    • "You may have noticed that WinRT does not have automatic resolution of a DataTemplate based on the data type of object added to an ItemsControl. While unfortunate as this behavior is quite handy, it's not too difficult to replicate the functionality using a DataTemplateSelector..."

  • Tips and tricks for the Windows 8 app developer with HTML5/Javascript: Handling the reset (clear) of a textbox (David Catuhe)

    • "Windows 8 introduced a real nice feature for textbox: the clear button. By clicking on this button, you can simply empty the textbox. But the question is: how can I handle the associated event? In fact, as usual, it is pretty simple (when you have the solution!). You just have to handle the oninput event..."

  • How to cook a Windows 8 application with HTML5/Javascript/CSS3: RTM version (David Catuhe)

    • "With the availability of Windows 8 RTM, you can now download the RTM version of UrzaGatherer..."

  • Adventures in Windows 8: HTTP Post Helper WinRT Component (Frank La Vigne)

    • "Are you writing a Metro style app in JavaScript and dealing with a pesky HTTP 302 server response? Are you using the WinJS.xhr to send an HTTP POST request and everything appears to work fine, but you don't see any cookies come back from the server? Then I may have your answer..."

  • Saving File to Byte Array in Windows 8 WinRT (Mahmoud Medhat Moussa)

    • "I've been hitting my head to the ground for a couple of days trying send a byte array that represents my Image to my WCF Service in Windows 8, things has changed a lot when it comes to IO and Streams in Windows 8 so I included my code here for others to use..."

  • Video Tutorials on WinRT app development (Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu)

    • "My team at Microsoft did a day long webcast on WinRT app development. Please find the video recordings below..."

  • Bring Your Apps to Life with Tiles and Notifications (Channel 9)

    • "Tiles draw users back into your app by bringing your tile to life on the Start screen. Notifications, delivered through the Windows Notification Service, draw users back into your app even when it's not running. In this session you'll learn how to implement Tiles, Notifications and allow users to personalize their Start screen by creating pinned Tiles..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • MetroAppBarSample (GitHub)

    • "Sample [application] to show off all the default AppBar button styles Microsoft ships in the RTM version of Visual Studio 2012..."

  • Q42.WinRT (GitHub)

    • "Open source library for Windows 8 C#/XAML applications. This library is focused on web connected and data driven applications. It includes helpers to easily cache data from API calls and cache web images to the local storage. There`s also a DataLoader included which functions as a wrapper around a Task method. You can bind a ProgressBar or ProgressRing to the DataLoader and show it as long as the task is running..."

Books

  • Free ebook: Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Second Preview) (Microsoft Press)

    • "... Kraig here. Hello again! Now that the RTM build of Windows 8 is out and available to developers, along with upgraded tools, I'm delighted to offer the next preview release of my book, Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since the first release in June, we've added eight more chapters, bringing the total to 12 out of a planned 17. The new chapters cover collection controls (everything you wanted to know about ListView!), layout (especially view states), commanding UI (app bars, message dialogs, and their friends), the all-important topic of managing state, a close look at input and sensors (a form of input, really), media, animations, and contracts (share, search, the file pickers, and contacts). The earlier preview chapters (1-4) have also been updated and refined..."